The Dreaming Dragons Part 11

The medic rose. 'I have been in comsat consultation this afternoon with Drs Zinoviev and Sipyagin. It is their considered judgment that the effects of the 17-Tg-M strain approximate, on a temporary basis, the cortical disruption that afflicts Hieronymus Dean. Hence the panic. _Escherichia coli_ is a bacterium we all carry in our intestinal tracts. A tailored variety, bearing a puerilizing plasmid gene in its cytoplasm, would multiply on release like a chain reaction. I stress, therefore, that the Russian biochemists insist that 17-Tg-M is a disabled strain. It is viable only in the laboratory. Even if it escaped by accident, it would perish.

'For our purposes, though, the interesting feature of 17-Tg-M is its ability to generate a small endorphin peptide, arg-enkephalin. Endorphins are morphine-like substances, produced naturally by the human body. The probability is high that this one plays a role in some forms of gross mental r.e.t.a.r.dation and behaviour defects. Apparently it binds so tightly to cortical neuron receptors that their function is ma.s.sively reduced.'

Northcote consulted his notes. 'I won't weary you with the biochemical architecture. Fortunately, the Russians have already isolated out the plasmid puffs from 17-Tg-M as independent preparations. These have very little effect on the pituitary until stimulated by further enzymatic co-factors, at which times arg-enkephalin production is enormously accelerated. Stocks of the a.n.a.logue are being flown here at this moment.' Abruptly he sat down.

'You have a question, Dr Fedorenko?'

'Yes. Was the Major saying that you intend to use this substance on men going into the Vault?'

'It is a possibility we must explore.'

'The idea is outrageous. Has the degradation of my colleague Kukushkin served no purpose at all?'

Komarov, the electronics expert, said: 'Before we get sucked into the mire of Victor's ethics, let me report the progress of my own team. The null-suit is ready. I am confident that it will permit us to obtain entry to the Vault without relying on the peculiar oracular powers of our young Australian friend.'

'Thank Christ for the voice of sanity.' said Lowenthal. Controversy began. Sevastyianov gave them their heads. This, after all, was the reason they had been gathered together and made privy to the world's dark secrets. Alf stared at his hands, listening to the absence of rain. In the conference room its drumming had been close to inaudible; now its truancy deafened him with intimations of significance. Skin, the tan already fading. Hairs like any animal's. The dragon had been covered in a fine down of feathers. Fingernails. He'd been chewing at them again. Beneath the skin, threads of blood vessels. On the tides of the blood, hormones: protein messengers, driven by the nucleotide messengers of his DNA. Tide and time. The bones beneath the veins, the sacred bones. Bill was arguing with Victor Fedorenko, insisting that the Vault meant them to use the drug from their mutant bacterium. How could one lift out and away from this web of flesh when that was all there was? The American had promised to show Alf the data from his...o...b.. studies as soon as the books were flown in from the States. As the arg-enkephalin was being flown from some b.a.s.t.a.r.d's laboratory in saltiest Siberia. A consensus seemed to be emerging in the discussion: they wouldn't use the null-suit until the drug was on hand. Both eggs in one basket. Only way to make an omelette. Did dragons go broody, hatching their eggs?

Bill touched his shoulder. 'Let's go, sport.'

*10. Uluru*

Under the limpid, prodigious sky, the Rock Uluru was an orange-red Leviathan stranded by immense catastrophe in some limitless swamp, flanks scarred, tormented by stinging flies. It took an effort of will for Alf to translate the image to reality: flocks of finches soaring against the morning's katabatic winds, the purely natural downdraughts provoked by the ma.s.sive stone anomaly. He tousled Mouse's hair, dropped his arm with sudden protective urgency around the boy's shoulders. The Vault's oracle took us to the edge of disaster, he thought, and then it guided us back with a single symbolic intervention.

The Beast, with Captain Hugh Lapp at the wheel, rocked through the red mud and lush gra.s.s of the new marsh. Alf had never been car-sick in his life; he hardly recognised the faint nausea for what it was. It's damaged me, he told himself. Something has gone awry permanently in my hindbrain. I'm giddy most of the day, and when I lie down to sleep I wake with nightmares of falling into infinity.

It was difficult not to respond to the Vault as to a force implacably malign. Yet it had hung out its rainbow in the sky, turned off its outer defences at the very moment they were reading Kukushkin's explosive diary, dispersed the storm-clouds which had brooded over the Rock for the best part of a year. At least the farmers in the eastern States will be grateful, Alf thought. They'll be praising G.o.d for the end of the drought. Perhaps they should be directing their thanks to the devil.

'It's big,' Lapp said.

'It's stupendous,' said Bill delFord, sitting on the other side of Mouse in the back of the Land Rover. 'That G.o.dd.a.m.n hunk of rock is nearly as tall as the Empire State Building, and taller than the Chrysler Building. You could bury a city of skysc.r.a.pers inside it.'

The fatuous comparison irked Alf. How much finer, he thought, were the metaphors of the black people who came to Uluru's caverns for wors.h.i.+p. From this angle, from the north, most of the great scallops and b.u.t.tresses were hidden, but even from here one could see the last camp of Linga, the Lizard-man, the boulders which were the food piles of the Mala women. On the south face, undercut deep into the stone, the pools which had persisted even through the millennia when the rainfall had been little more than a hundred millimetres a year were not merely a source of physical sustenance: they were Muitjilda Water, the blood of dying Kunia, and the water-stains in the ancient flaking stone were the blood stains, petrified at Dreaming's end, of dying Liru. Lichen had once been the smoke rising terribly from the burning camp of the Sleepy-Lizard. Gutters gouged into the furrowed dome of Uluru were the tracks of escaping Malas. Nothing here was merely mundane; each stone and cranny had been transvalued by the deepest emotions of men and women.

Alf recognised that his peevishness stemmed as much from a sense of dread, of contingency, as from any abstract legitimate grievance. He took his arm away from Mouse and opened the journal on his knee. For all his love of myth, out-of-body-experience was a postulate he still regarded with profound suspicion. Yet what alternative concept came halfway close to accounting for the appalling dislocation of reality he'd known as the Gate had hurled him on the trajectory of some incomprehensible equation into the halls of h.e.l.l? He had spent the sleepless night reading an absurd concoction by a man now dead, one Robert A. Monroe; it startled him, as he read delFord's article now, to find the Englishman agreeing with his own incredulous scorn.

The vehicle's jouncing made his head swim. Alf sighed and put the journal aside again. All around, the sky's glorious cloudless blue was reflected back from the layers of water gleaming between clumps of glossy desert succulents, gra.s.ses, the gnarled roots of mulga scrub. The wheels spun and skidded, fighting for traction in the preternatural mud, but Alf knew that the endless mirror would be gone in weeks, perhaps in days, sucked inexorably into the thirsty soil. Then the true spectacle would blossom. Desert would be transvalued not in the austere imaginations of animistic nomads but in the explosive biochemistry of a dormant ecology.

Already, despite the ferocious beating of the rains, the air was stunning with the fragrance of golden ca.s.sias. Emu-bushes, lewdly swollen, opened their languorous blooms like flame and embers: cinnabar, crimson, heliotrope, all the pink v.a.g.i.n.al shades of promised fertility. The morning light slanted in through the tufts of spinifex, circled the needles of desert oaks in light. All the trees were bent, hard, angular plants, the bonsai of extremity. And presiding over all the living creatures, the silver-grey acacias, the white-cypress pines, the sudden fluid bounding of a distant mob of graceful red kangaroos, rose the awful measure of their transience: Uluru, red as granite, glowing sunlit like brick taken from a kiln.

Victor Fedorenko, seated on the left in the front seat, shook his head slowly. 'It is magnificent. I have climbed in the Himalayas, where the snows block out the skies and one fears the earth is tilting, but this is -- incomparable.' The ma.s.sive dip of the bedding, thrusting from the earth at eighty degrees, caught the sun. 'And what we see is just the residue of a pyramid more than a kilometre high.'

Dreamily, Mouse said: 'Great seal.'

Alf laughed. 'I thought it looked like a whale.'

'Very like a whale,' Bill agreed. Then he said, in a shocked voice, 'My G.o.d. The Great Seal.' He dug out his bill-fold, extracted a dollar note. Shakily, he said, 'Maybe the Vault is an Illuminati plot.'

Mouse greeted the banknote with enthusiasm. He seized it, brought it close to his right eye, rubbed it against his forehead. 'Annuit Coeptis,' he said clearly. 'Novus Ordo Seculorum.'

Fedorenko leaned over the back of his seat and stared speculatively at the boy. '"He favours our undertaking," he translated. '"A new order of the ages." It is an invitation from the Vault intelligence.'

'By G.o.d, it's more than that,' Bill said. He retrieved the note. 'After all the mystical claptrap that's been babbled about the Great Seal, we finally know what the original was.'

Lapp eased the Beast up onto the glistening tarmac of the abandoned tourist airstrip. His new course took them parallel to the north face of the great tor, the morning sun behind them. Thirty kilometres distant, vivid through the purified air, the tumbled monoliths of Mt Olga came into view past the north-western edge of the Rock.

'This is the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States,' Bill explained to Alf, showing him the truncated pyramid at the left of the note, topped by its floating, radiant triangle and the unblinking left eye within it. 'The design is over two hundred years old, attributed to Franklin, Adams, and particularly Thomas Jefferson. I'd never noticed it before, but the d.a.m.ned thing's _not_ a pyramid -- it's a narrow wedge. It's a slice _through_ a pyramid. And look at the angle of incline: it must be 65, 70 degrees. But the usual slope of Egyptian pyramids was 52 degrees.' He pointed at the striations furrowing the Rock. 'That's closer to the line of Jefferson's design.'

'You're crazy,' Alf said weakly. 'Gosse, the first white man here, didn't reach the Rock until 1872. Do you think Jefferson was given to astral travelling in his sleep?'

'Don't blame me,' Bill said with some asperity. 'It was the kid's idea.'

Even at this distance, they could hear the moaning of the winds moving over the deep, eroded caves. The vehicle b.u.mped off the end of the runway, heading for the road that looped Uluru. Good old Beast, Alf thought fondly. He had been heartily relieved when a group of Project experts airlifted her in after her lonely vigil near the Tanami cave. Light danced from the red Rock; cascades of water were spilling in filigrees from the fresh pools on Uluru's lofty dome.

Ahead, casting black shadow across the delicate hues of the desert wildlife, a stupendous slab of stone leaned toward the Rock. A ribbon of pale sky showed between. The slab was 70 metres tall, one tenth as thick.

'The Rock's shedding its skin,' the astronaut commented.

'That is exactly what it is doing,' Fedorenko said. 'The whole tor is composed of arkose grit, with several bands of conglomerate bounded by siliceous cement. For millions of years the surface has been flexing under a diurnal temperature range of 25 degrees Celsius or more, so that thin flakes constantly break off and degrade under the wind-blown sand. Exfoliation has been most marked in the west and the southeast; this slab is all that remains of a sh.e.l.l that once covered the entire tor. Since the rock is so h.o.m.ogeneous, so solid, such weathering is wearing it down in a fairly even fas.h.i.+on.'

Lapp found the tourist road and picked up speed. 'I'd like to climb that mother,' he said, and affected not to hear delFord's sn.i.g.g.e.r of amus.e.m.e.nt from the back seat. 'Unfortunately, the general has put it out of bounds. Maybe he figures the wanambi is still ticklish.' Nevertheless, he stopped the Land Rover at the western b.u.t.tress where a curving handrail of chains rose in catenary curves up a natural ramp a kilometre long. Against the bright line of sky at the top, several 'dead finish' acacias lifted gnarled, imploring limbs from the meagre soil of narrow clefts. Alf found himself s.h.i.+vering, despite the heat that brought waves of mist from the drying earth. He opened delFord's article again, while its author climbed from the vehicle and urinated noisily into a muddy puddle.

A door slammed. Hugh and the Russian made their way carefully through the red-splashed spinifex toward the thirty-degree slope. Alf asked the boy, 'Do you want to go with them, have a look at the Rock?'

Mouse rolled up his eyes until only the whites were visible and stayed where he was. Bill got back in, grabbed an oily rag, and wiped mud from his fas.h.i.+onable riding boots. 'Feeling any better, Alf?'

'I'm okay. Do you publish much in the _Journal of Biblical Accountancy?_'

'Ah, the Monroe debate.' Bill laughed gleefully. 'Are you familiar with _The Worm Runners Digest?_ I believe it's defunct, unless they've got it going again on the Web.'

'I've heard of it. Scientific spoofs, that sort of thing.'

'And serious articles, often a bit too novel or eccentric for the straight press. My friend Bjorn Bangsund decided the study of altered states of awareness was getting too stuffy, too eager to emulate the tired old s.h.i.+bboleths which had hamstrung academic psychology. So he launched the campus of Ard-Knox in Oslo, an imaginary university with faculties in disciplines such as Theological Engineering. I'm an honorary member of the Board of Deputies, with an advanced degree in Biblical Accountancy. Professor Bangsund delivers the annual keynote address. As I recall, his inaugural statement was a closely reasoned fiscal a.n.a.lysis of how much it profiteth a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul.'

Alf smiled, with a hunch that his leg was being pulled. The other two men had turned back, deterred by the slush. 'Bill, why do you bother with this bulls.h.i.+t?'

'Astral projection? Because it's a hypothesis that helps organise the weird data we keep getting from our affect experiments.'

'But Monroe -- '

Bill pa.s.sed the wet rag to the swearing astronaut. 'What he says sounds nuts -- but it's awfully close to the reports I've been reading on the ravings of your unlucky predecessors into the Vault. Charlie Tart took him seriously. So did Lilly.'

'Yes,' said Alf in exasperation, 'but I thought this paper of yours was meant to discredit their gullibility.'

'What do we discuss?' Fedorenko asked.

Bill gave him a brisk rundown on the author of _Journeys Out of the Body_. The book had appeared in 1972; its author was then a middle-aged businessman who had been studied by Professor Charles Tart on and off between September 1965 and August 1966. He was president of two corporations active in media and electronics, and had opened a 'Mind Research Inst.i.tute' in Virginia in 1971. Monroe claimed to have discovered the existence of a transparent 'Second Body' in 1958. According to his book, a ray had struck him from the northern sky as he lay snoozing on a couch. It shook him savagely, making his whole body vibrate. Months later, during a recurrent session with the vibrations, he unintentionally moved his 'astral' arm out of his flesh. Medical and psychiatric examinations gave him a clean bill of health. With due caution, he learned to induce the vibrational state, control it, and leave his body completely.

'John Lilly has endorsed Monroe's findings in print. Tart has stated that -- '

Mouse sat forward and said in his high voice: '"It will be very tempting to dismiss Robert Monroe as a madman. I suggest that you not do that. Neither would I suggest you take everything he says as absolute truth. He is a good reporter, a man I have immense respect for, but he is one man, brought up in a particular culture at a particular time."' The boy beamed at them.

'Christ,' Bill said, 'I wish he wouldn't do that. He'll get himself carted off on a diabolic possession rap.'

'What were Monroe's claims?' Fedorenko asked. 'There are increasing numbers of reports of such phenomena in Russia and our neighbors, even in China -- something called Chi Gong, I believe.'

'Oh, standard occult recipes,' Bill said. 'Relax with your body oriented north-south. Only he tried to put it on a statistical basis. That shot down a lot of trad ideas, if you take him seriously. It didn't depend on physical debility. There was no discernible relations.h.i.+p between OOBEs and lunar or planetary configurations. But he found that the auric body is subject to EM interference. In 1960, he zipped out while lying in a Faraday cage carrying 50 kilovolts. He seemed to get tangled up in a flexible bag, and couldn't get through it. Another time, he was stopped by power primaries in a street.'

'It sounds exactly like what happened under the gluon screen,' Hugh said.

'That was just the start,' Bill cautioned. 'Most of Monroe's jaunts have taken him to a cosmos he terms "Locale II". Heaven and h.e.l.l, you'll be interested to hear, are just suburbs. It's the embodiment of primary process. The region of Locale II closest to our world is populated by three nasty groups -- the astrally projecting insane, those emotionally r.e.t.a.r.ded dead who can't bear to tear themselves away, and a host of mean sprites indigenous to the realm. Bad trips for the novice.' He seized the journal, found a paragraph.

'You'll love this. He saw G.o.d once. There's a blast of heraldic trumpets, and everyone -- including transients like Monroe -- respond with an instant reflex. "Every living thing lies down -- my impression is on their backs, bodies arched to expose the abdomen (not the genitals), with head turned to one side so that one does not see Him as He pa.s.ses by. The purpose seems to be to form a living road over which he can travel.... As he pa.s.ses, there is a roaring musical sound and a feeling of radiant, irresistible living force of ultimate power that peaks overhead and fades in the distance."'

This time, Mouse had remained silent, but the astronaut had not. With a wheezing gasp, he bottled his mirth until Bill stopped reading, uttering small choking sounds that exploded into a roar of laughter. 'Not the genitals,' he said finally. 'Not the genitals.'

'Not everything in Locale II is so transcendent, by any means,' Bill said loftily. 'For Lapp's benefit, I must point out that s.e.x of a sort is practised there widely, rather as we shake hands, or, if we are astronauts, as we practise s.e.x widely.' Hugh made another convulsive inhalation, and Alf was undone as Mouse began applauding enthusiastically, bringing his hands together like pistol shots. 'It involves a total interpenetration,' Bill added heroically, 'of the astral bodies. This produces a tingly delight far surpa.s.sing mere genital play, you primitive swine.'

'Of course,' Lapp hooted. 'G.o.d forbid the genitals.'

'Thrilling as these disclosures are,' Bill said, 'they didn't exhaust Monroe's findings. At the end of 1958, he discovered a hole into a parallel physical universe, "Locale III". The residents of this world are human, but they have a different history and culture to ours. They have eschewed electromagnetic technology, internal combustion, and the use of oil, making do with steam power and possibly nuclear energy.'

'The Doppelganger world,' Fedorenko said seriously. He had not entirely approved of their unrestrained mirth.

'You bet,' said delFord. 'To Monroe's agreeable surprise, he found that he can take over his double's personality simply by entering the unhappy fellow's body. Over the years, he kept tags on the double's rather gloomy life, including a marriage to a divorcee named Lea with two children, and their subsequent breakup.'

The astronaut grinned. 'What the h.e.l.l is a NASA-funded research program like yours doing studying this kind of demented garbage?'

'Ah, you are too quick to reject,' Fedorenko said sternly. 'Must we not inquire of its source? You say this man has been tested in the laboratory?'

'Right. Tart asked him to identify some distant random numbers. Other OOBEs had succeeded with this task, but Monroe bombed. He explains that the rapid transit system is liable to grievous misrouting, since the slightest distraction can divert the astral traveller to the wrong address.'

'But you know the whole thing's c.r.a.p,' Alf said testily. 'Half your paper here deals with cogent details Monroe left out of his book.'

'Indeed,' Bill said with satisfaction. He sat back with his knees up and his hands linked over his belly. 'By a stroke of luck, we can compare this wholesome, apple-pie account with another version by Andrija Puharich, published ten years earlier in _Beyond Telepathy_. The good doctor cites the diary notes of one "Bob Rame", a successful New York media business -- '

'Is this the Puharich who studied Uri Geller, the metalbender?' Fedorenko asked with suspicion.

'That's him. A nice guy, Andrija, but gullible. Well, here's "Rame's" story.' He consulted his article. '"In a desk cubbyhole, a piece of plywood had to be glued into place with a cement. As I brushed on the cement, I noticed a feeling of light-headedness and for a period I remembered nothing." A pleasant sensation, evidently,' Bill commented, looking up, 'and one to which, when the occasion arose, "Rame" had recourse repeatedly.'

'An intoxicant?' Fedorenko asked, shocked. He had been ready to believe, Alf realised with aversion.

'Bet your a.s.s. Right: "One night, unable to sleep, at around two in the morning I went into the room where I had been working, obtained a can, and went downstairs and sat, occasionally taking a casual smell ... Then quite suddenly, as I looked at the can, I felt as if a ray or some kind of energy had come down from a low angle and bathed the upper half of my body...."'

Lapp turned the ignition key. 'In _ethyl ether veritas_,' he said.

'None of this was in Monroe's book?' asked the Russian.

'Not a word,' Alf said. 'I would have supposed it to be of more than pa.s.sing interest in such a case.'

'And this subsequent inhalation was sufficient to trigger the OOBEs?'

'By no means,' Bill said. The vehicle drifted past the southwest curve of the Rock. In the shade of several great flying b.u.t.tresses, luxuriant growth glowed from protected pools. '"Rame" began tuning in on various radio stations of the mind -- '

'"People were talking,"' Mouse quoted, just such a radio station, his unbroken voice carrying clearly over the growl of the engine, '"mostly along the lines of jazz, foreign languages, odd music and fast chatter."'

'_s.h.i.+t_, that's unnerving,' Hugh said, looking over his shoulder. 'Is he picking it up from us by telepathy, or has he memorised the article?'

'I don't know,' delFord said frankly. 'I think it's coming from the Vault, but don't ask me to justify that.' The boy was gazing raptly at a peregrine soaring on the boisterous drafts. 'Anyway, after further nocturnal communion with the cement can, "Rame" found himself floating four feet above the bed. As you can imagine, I was rather cross with Tart for letting Monroe get away with deleting the sniff-tripping from his book, and I whipped off the article to Bangsund. Keeping it in the family, as it were. Then Lilly got into the act, defending Monroe's experiences by references to his own independent "simulations of G.o.d", and it was generally concluded that since Monroe's book was for general public consumption his entree to OOBE via the cement can was best kept as restricted information.'

Angrily, Alf said, 'Bill, you're avoiding the issue. Do you normally pin your research on the hallucinations of a cement sniffer?'

'You miss the point,' delFord told him calmly. 'Victor was right -- you are too quick to judge. The cement fumes were a gateway, that's all, as acid and yoga and biofeedback and meditation are all potential paths of access to authentic OOBE. My complaint was that the details had been censored. But Monroe and others like him also cite case after case of veridical information gained paranormally while in the astral state. I think his fantasies are symbolism, as your dragon dream was symbolism, and we need to unlock their meaning. Now that I know about the Vault, I suspect that they are something more critical than that, something whose implications are apocalyptic.'

Without prompting or preamble, Mouse said, '"I received the firm impression that I was inextricably bound by loyalty to this intelligent force, always had been, and that I had a job to perform here on Earth. The job was not necessarily to my liking, but I was a.s.signed to it. The impression was that I was manning a 'pumping station', that it was a dirty, ordinary job but it was mine and I was stuck with it."'

The astronaut put his foot on the brake so hard the Beast slewed around, pawing the road. He turned off the motor and stared at the boy. 'What the f.u.c.k's it trying to tell us?' he said, a touch of hysteria in his voice. For the first time Alf saw how deep the man's tensions were, how considerable were his fears. They're going to send him into the Vault, he told himself. With the insight, his skin oozed sweat. He felt himself losing consciousness. Yet he heard Bill delFord saying in a placatory tone, 'Just another quote from Monroe, Hugh. Maybe it's a random process, like flicking through a book and poking your finger at a paragraph.'

'It doesn't sound like that to me.' Abruptly, beyond the voices, Alf saw a tunnel of honeycomb tiles, brilliantly lighted. At an immense distance, he heard Bill saying, 'The pipes were rusty and overgrown, designed to transport some energy supply to an extraterrestrial civilisation. It's symbolism that crops up in Hubbard's Scientology and Lilly's simulations, though Lilly prefers soulless computers.' A man in a white glistening suit was walking down the tunnel to a large opening. 'According to Monroe, more than one consortium has been plundering this valuable material from the earth for eons, with much compet.i.tive tussling between them.' Other men stood behind him, tending instruments. The suited man swung around heavily at the edge of the opening, lowered one leg carefully over the side, and began his descent. They promised us there'd be a moratorium, Alf cried in fear. Just because the outer defences are down doesn't mean -- Someone was saying, 'Hubbard's mystical idea of the thetan. Following physical death, they are obliged to go to 'implant stations', where goals and trauma are imposed on them with crippling electric shocks.' The man was walking tentatively on the lower level, toward something huge which Alf refused to look at. No, no, no, he cried without sound. His body as slumping into the seat. Mouse was a vortex of energy, prismatic, through which he plunged. There was a cynical laugh. 'It would not surprise me in the least to learn that some luckless thetans are press-ganged into pumping stations by nefarious implanters.' The man staggered, beating his gloved fists against his head. 'He's asleep, let him rest. G.o.d, those colours are beautiful.' The Rock's striations, coral and orange, folded like waterfalls of stone into the earth. 'The other tors are stratified nearly horizontally. Uluru is directly between Mt Olga and Mt Connor, certainly part of the same formation, yet something has taken the crust and slammed it up at right angles. Could the Vault engineers -- ' Tottering forward, the man wrenched at his protective garments. He hurled them in every direction. His hair was on fire. Alf was paralysed. The man must have been screaming, as the skin bubbled and charred on his face and hands, crisping like baked pork. Alf's stomach voided itself horribly, explosively drenching the seat, running across Mouse's leg. The boy touched his hair tenderly, keening. The man fell, twitching, his long underwear igniting at last from the heat of his burning body. 'Jesus, get the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d out of the car.' Thick oily smoke billowed up and failed to hide the blackened, disintegrating corpse, for the draught from the Vault caught it up in eddies and streamers and carried it away as the body fell into glowing ash.

Alf's screams went on and on, high and shrill and driven.

Vacantly, he heard the crackle of the CB radio, saw Hugh Lapp put the microphone back and move into the shadow of the Beast, squatting beside him with a shocked, furious expression. 'The stupid f.u.c.king sons of b.i.t.c.hes,' he was saying. 'They couldn't wait for the drug. They sent another man in.'

'He burned up,' Alf said, crying. 'He's all burned up.'

*Four: Before Eden*

*11. Deep Time*

From the jewelled, prismatic cavern of encroaching crystals, her plumage in dulled tatters, Riona rhal Nesh came screaming like some poor mad creature. Perimeter alarms activated, shrilling, as she broke the boundary in her wild charge to protected territory. Pongid sentries added grunts and terrified curses to the uproar before they recognised her as a person. Belatedly, one of them slapped the panic b.u.t.ton OFF.

In the sudden silence, appallingly, she was still shrieking.

Abruptly, Riona seemed to realise she was safe. Her headlong dash faltered; she stumbled. Her screaming ebbed to wrenching sobs. Torn by crystals, she hunched on the deck and wept.

Anokersh huj Lers shot out of the Control-to-Perimeter express tube, darted a glance at the now immobile sentries, hurried to where the female lay. His talons rang against the metal of the deck, the ragged rhythm of his slamming heart.