The Dreaming Dragons Part 14

T'kosh brought his teeth clas.h.i.+ng together. And his eyes widened.

A jabber went up from the spectral gathering of deformed ferals. Anokersh twisted about. A pongid female stood at the edge of the clearing, crystal light spearing behind her dark, gravid body. At her shoulder, denuded of plumage, leaned the first person they had seen since their entry into the feral sanctuary. Anokersh heard the name wrenched from his heart: 'Chalzin! O Bones, what have they done to you, Chalzin huj Tighe?'

He had vanished into the Ancillary Core as a child, the first of them to disappear. Yet his ravaged features, gaunt, starved, collapsed, were now a mask of senility. His plucked flesh ran with pustules. 'Abase yourselves,' cried Chalzin huj Tighe, in a ghostly, foolish, imperious tone. 'Cover your heads, snakes!'

Cold, cold. Anokersh fixed his eyes in horror on the feral female. He thought of his silly, jolly pongid slaveys, lively Apple, old Lazy-legs, lewd Shrieker, always in heat, a score of the fat creatures he'd known since childhood, petted, sent ambling in their clumsy way to his bidding, and the comparison was ghastly. This female's skin was dull as the pelt of a corpse. She moved toward them, and Anokersh saw the six tiny b.r.e.a.s.t.s mounding her shrunken ribcage. Wild pongids ma.s.sed about her as she came, cried out as she raised her arms. Beneath the arm-pits, two more paps jutted in the bristled fur.

'Chalzin,' he shouted, 'have us released! Where are your companions? Are any others alive?'

The male babbled unintelligibly, began to dance and caper in lunatic frenzy. In the swelling tide of excitement, the feral tribes moaned and swayed.

'Kersh,' said a calm, sweet voice in his ear, 'hold on a few more minutes.'

He felt his knees buckle. 'Horrible,' he whispered to his spouse. 'Horrible, horrible.'

'We're having a little difficulty,' Diitchar told him. 'Some of the service tunnels have flow-welded their interface seals. When we're ready to come through I'll let you know.'

Abruptly, Chalzin huj Tighe stopped his cavorting. A pair of powerfully muscled ferals were dragging something heavy into the clearing. They shoved it into place before the pregnant female and stood back.

Smelted raw from bulkhead metal, it was a waist-high steel egg, rust-splashed.

Anokersh felt tears leap to his eyes. It was a tortured image, in knotted unpolished metal, of _The Soul_.

The damaged simians crowded closer, their stink ripping at his throat, their grunting chants echoing against the deck. With an inarticulate scream of rage, T'kosh huj Nesh surged forward. In a burst of startling speed, one of the feral guards leaped after him, blunt teeth gleaming with spittle, and brought its club cracking across the artist's head. T'kosh fell. Chalzin capered to his unconscious body, gesturing in manic glee, and dragged him slowly to the altar. 'Happiness and journey's end,' he t.i.ttered. From each hand, the finger had been amputated. The pongids who had brought the metal egg grasped T'kosh under the arms and dragged him across the dried confusion of dead vines; Chalzin fluttered ahead, reaching down tenderly to staunch the blood oozing from the artist's scalp. They hoisted T'kosh to the altar. His limbs fell backward, dangling from the rough curving surface. His head hung, mouth wide, throat exposed. Anokersh stared, aghast.

I have to wait, he told himself. I must wait.

With splendid dignity, the grotesque female mounted the unconscious body, her spindly legs wrapping T'kosh's shoulders, her face sinking to his groin. She hefted his unprotected genitals. A cry of pleasure rose from the ferals. Reality was a curdled, gelid wave in Anokersh's slowed brain. We have always waited, he thought. We have always been too late. Why can we never act? The Mother G.o.ddess lowered her gaping jaws. He is sterile, the Director cried silently, absurdly. His seed is barren. It cannot advance your l.u.s.t for freedom, for life.

A hissing implosion shook the air. 'We're through!' Diitchar's voice cried in his ear. Heavy thuds; plumed bodies dropped from the roof. 'I'm going to detonate a flare!'

Time convulsed. '_Get down!_' Anokersh screamed to his group. 'Cover your eyes! Don't look up!' He hurled himself to the deck. In the instant he buried his muzzle in dried vegetation, he saw the feral female hold high her head in fury.

Light bloomed, a silent monumental surge of blinding radiance. Even with his eyes covered, glaring crimson splashed pain. The pongids screamed in anguish, blundered heavily in blinded agony.

Anokersh felt hands at his bonds, heard the sharp whirr of a power blade slicing. Then he was up, his arms around his spouse. A welding mask was thrust high on her forehead, a dark smear on gold. Flames hissed as the parched hydroponics vegetation burned.

He fell off the edge of the universe.

Instantly, the implants under his talons magnetised. A jolt went through his body as his flailing feet clanged to the deck. He gulped hard. Flame control circuits had cut local gravity. The fires, ignited by the intense flare, smothered smokily into extinction.

Blinded, howling ferals spun slowly in the air, victims of a failsafe system they could never have imagined. The brutes had never known the erotic luxury of null sleepers; weightlessness terrified them.

'Kersh, I brought you a power-gun.' Diitchar thrust it into his hand, choking with loathing. The air was vile with the ferals' vomit. 'Stezna has the pressure suit.'

He activated his link to control. 'Leave the gravity off,' he ordered the program.

T'kosh huj Nesh was still unconscious. He floated almost vertically above the metal egg, knees bent about the curve of the thing, talons clamped magnetically to its rough surface. His twisted ankles were sprained and swollen. Blood covered his groin. Stezna reached him, administered an a.n.a.lgesic jet, drew him carefully out of reach of the shrilling pregnant female drifting above him.

They need not die, Anokersh told himself desperately, struggling into the pressure suit. Graphs and equations blurred in his mind. Cast out, they would hurtle across the interface between time and paratime, shedding their inertia into the external s.h.i.+elds. He did not believe it.

'Back to the access shaft,' he yelled. 'When you're all through into the Civilised sectors, _seal off!_ Move!' A greater terror: what would happen to the Ancillary Core? Like a sledgehammer blow into a naked cortex....

Diitchar closed the helmet under his muzzle, shot pressure tabs. 'Life-support indicators?' Her voice still came through his printed transceiver.

'All active,' he bellowed. '_Move!_'

She pressed her hands against his breast. 'We've located three of the missing people,' she told him softly. 'Their minds are -- damaged.'

'There'll be a time for healing,' he said. The horror of his duty moved in him like ice. He turned away.

When the access seal closed, he thumbed the power setting to paralysis strength and roved through the chaos. It was an act of mercy. The fires had died swiftly, leaving the makes.h.i.+ft hydroponics tanks sludgy with charred leaves, stumps of vegetation like burnt bones. Limp bodies hung about him, adults and pups. They are intelligent beings, he told himself. They are not of the Living People, but they share our consciousness. That knowledge was intolerable. He stood in silence and surveyed the work of his hands.

'Everybody's through,' Diitchar reported, and for a long moment he could not comprehend her words. 'Kersh,' she said, a touch of panic in her voice, 'we're all in. The sector locks are all sealed behind the Perimeter lines. Do you read me?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Close this line. I don't want anyone monitoring it.'

'Yes, my love.'

He gave the Priority code once more, told the computer to read back his program. Without hesitation it did so. His blood was liquid lead. He thought of Ghine do Lod and Thali huj Salder in equivocal bliss.

With frozen thumbs, he found the suit's safety line. He bound himself to a stanchion as far from the emergency hull lock as he could find.

He closed his eyes.

Faintly, through the thick skin of the pressure suit, there came the cry of a feral pup waking from paralysis to terror.

He screamed the activation order.

Winds roared about him. He had never known winds before. Soft, heavy thumps. Sounds of vegetation ripping, torn in ma.s.ses from their matted roots. With the crash and tinkle of breaking gla.s.s, segments of the crystal ma.s.s, the Ancillary Core, the memories of his People, sundered from the corridor walls into the high shrill keening air. Wind howled into the ultimate emptiness of paratime. His pressure suit creaked, adjusting to vacuum. Vileness clotted the outside of his faceplate. The double doors gaped open to the grey opalescence of centuries flickering in elided pa.s.sage. Lights within the empty section splashed stark on bloodstained walls. I have not killed them, he told himself. They are scattered through ages of lost time. He vomited. Vileness clotted the inside of his faceplate.

Anokersh huj Lers ordered the locks closed and sealed.

He crawled in the bowels of the Mission craft.

In the med bay, ahead, there was one last feral to dispose of.

Mistress Diitchar rhal Lers waited, with her love and forgiveness, beneath the ventilator shaft. He could not take her hand.

*Five: An Habitation of Dragons*

*14. The Vault*

Bill DelFord unclipped his safety belt, climbed shakily over the side of the plastic pulley-drawn car that had brought them down from the surface. The huge cable tw.a.n.ged an organ note; way behind them, beyond the multiple switchbacks, the motor which drove it was taking up slack half a kilometre outside the original limits of the Vault's destructive field.

A forced draft thrust fingers into his thin hair, lifted the sweat and heat from his face. Hugh Lapp leaped athletically from the ludicrous car, so reminiscent of a carnival toy, and together they followed the grey-suited corporal down the last hundred metres of the steep tunnel.

'R&D have sent your protective suiting ahead, gentlemen,' the corporal said. His voice boomed and echoed along the tunnel. 'You'll change into it at this checkpoint.' Bill tried to smile an acknowledgment, knowing they might all explode into a greasy cloud of dispersed colloids at any moment. Already, thighs and belly were protesting peevishly at the unusual slope beneath his feet. There was a hollow rumbling; he looked over his shoulder. The plastic cable car was retreating back up the boron-epoxy tube to the landing that glimmered a kilometre behind them. Even with the stiff gradient the engineers had maintained in these four-metre diameter burrows, he and Lapp had ridden eight or nine klicks to come this deep.

'I should have insisted on phoning Selma and the boy,' he said.

The astronaut glanced at him uncomfortably. 'It's a son of a b.i.t.c.h,' he agreed. 'Security'd never wear it. How are you feeling, Bill?'

'Same as you, I imagine. Floppy. s.h.i.+tty, in fact. But feeling no pain.' He started to laugh, and had to restrain himself. Ah, the whimsical b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, he thought.

Gaslight flared white and sharp as they rounded the bend into the landing. Several troops in the blue-capped UN uniform of the Project regarded them with dull, sullen suspicion from behind their emplacements. Bored technicians tended their makes.h.i.+ft instruments, conferred in murmurs. The corporal led them across the flat surface to a frail plastic box-like office, knocked, ushered them in.

General Joseph Ahearn Sawyer was a small, vigorous Texan. 'Good morning, gentlemen. You're a little ahead of schedule or I'd have met you at the terminal.' He pumped their hands, directed them to curved polystyrene chairs, offered them coffee from the chemically heated percolator bubbling beside his cluttered desk. 'I'm delighted to meet you at last, Dr delFord. Ready to make the dash to history?'

'It'll help settle my breakfast,' Bill said. Less than five hundred metres from this preposterous office was the monstrous thing he and Lapp had come to challenge. He felt death snuffling for his scent. Cut that c.r.a.p, he told himself sharply. Fear will keep me razor-edge alert, but not if I get morbid.

'We're all jumpy when we're waiting for action,' the general said. DelFord looked away. Spare me, he groaned. But Sawyer was insisting, 'Let me tell you, I came close to messing my neat new military pants the first time I -- But you won't want to hear my tall combat tales. Let's go meet the gang; they're waiting in the staff room.'

Enzymes swirled and clicked in Bill's brain. They seemed almost audible to him. He found himself giggling again. The G.o.dd.a.m.ned stuff isn't supposed to chain react until it's metabolised, he thought with distant annoyance. The miracle of the age. Secret of eternal youth. But he couldn't fault the unofficial name the biochemists had chosen for the tiny peptide which the 17-Tg-M a.n.a.logue was sluggishly fabricating from the beta-lipotropin proteins in his pituitary. Asinine, he reflected, chortling with merriment. If heroin is the drug of heroes, he asked himself, who will dare admit to a craving for asinine? Of course the sober souls of the Death Machine found nothing amusing in the sobriquet; they insisted that the pentapeptide be known strictly as arg-enkephalin. The amino acids danced in a chain before Bill's inward gaze, a rondo of molecules: tyrosine-glycine-glycine-phenylalanine-arginine. Religion, he thought, giggling, is indeed the opiate of the people. For what, indeed, is enkephalin, in its wholesome macrobiotic DDT-free endogenous met and leu-varieties, but G.o.d's own painkiller? They should have called it mysticin.

'Hugh, Hugh, my ole orbiting buddy,' he said, slapping the astronaut on the back, 'I'm. Truly. Feeling. No pain.'

'You crazy junky,' Lapp said, leading him to a couch. 'You're not stoned, it's premature senility. Lie down for a moment and I'll get you a cold c.o.ke.'

'For Christ's sake,' Bill said imploringly, 'no artificial stimulants. We have to be pure of heart.'

His head cleared as he lay there, staring up at two and a half kilometres of rock and sand. He ripped open a stick of gum. It was one of the more inconsequential side effects of the Vault's destructive N-branes that most of the Project's nicotine addicts had switched to chewing gum. The instruments used down here all depended on jerryrigged chemical processes rather than electronic steady states -- so the smokers had been obliged to leave their cigarettes on the surface, for fear of chemical explosion, and now everyone had developed the taste for gum.

It was subtly but altogether disturbing, as he glanced around the patchwork staff room, to know that the closest electronics equipment was kilometres away. Communication with the surface was effected princ.i.p.ally through a bulky hydraulic contraption mounted on a st.u.r.dy steel desk, its heavy tube boring up through the ceiling into rock. The input/output was a ma.s.sively geared mechanical typewriter.

There was nothing in the entire area a nineteenth-century pre-electronics engineer couldn't have cobbled together ... if he'd possessed the sophisticated synthetic materials, and the shop capable of turning out parts tooled to tolerances that would have staggered him.

And all this desperate ingenuity was shaped to the single appalling fact of the Vault's destructive field. It was not a gluon s.h.i.+eld; the effect was more subtle, selective. He had seen one of its parameters altered already, when the rain stopped. Surely that was the active decision of intelligence. The central effect remained in force, however. The Vault still would not tolerate foreign electromagnetic activity an order of magnitude greater than the bioenergetic processes of the human body.

Bill sat up. His heart was hammering again. Within minutes he and Hugh would be going down to break the Vault, armed with its own key. Maybe. More probably the Vault would break them. He could not stop thinking of the films of the burning man.

The astronaut joined him on the couch. Medics fussed over them. Bill said, 'I'd feel happier if they'd flown Anne in.' Yin and yang, he thought. There are no s.e.xual monopoles, any more than magnetic charges exist in isolation. The Three Musketeers face the Field Force Monster. Yet it had worked, before, at the Inst.i.tute.

'Too many risks to bring a woman down there,' Hugh said. 'I agree with them.' He bunched one arm as the hypodermic was inserted into his triceps muscle, injecting the enzyme solution that would vastly accelerate his pituitary production of asinine.

Bill scowled, delivering up his own limb. 'You diminish yourself, Hugh. You're maligning half the human race.' He flinched. 'Anne Hawthorne would have your b.a.l.l.s for garters if she heard you agreeing with those dorks.'

Harris Lowenthal leaned over them. 'Time to suit up, guys.' The psychologist was crisp, rea.s.suring; the brittle cynicism of the first briefing had vanished completely. 'Then we'll go down with you to the three hundred metre post.'

'Yes,' Bill said. Lowenthal was searching his face. He tried to keep his cringing fear from showing. His cheeks felt cold in the muggy air. He followed Lapp to the benches where the Russian electronics expert Komarov was waiting with the null-suits. The princ.i.p.al fact that had been brutally impressed upon him was that no one could enter the Vault Zone twice. The Vault permitted a single intrusion, exacting sanity as its price of admission. Second time round you were dead.

'Repeat the procedures,' the psychologist demanded.

'We have one hour,' Bill said tiredly. A ma.s.s of cotton was mopping its way through his brain. 'You ring the bells every fifteen minutes. A series of coded klaxons counts down the last ten minutes.'

The codes had been scorched into his unconscious memory by narcohypnosis, operant conditioning, and old-fas.h.i.+oned fear-driven study. He would react to those bells, he thought, grimacing, if he were three days buried in h.e.l.l.

'Well, General, I think that completes the review,' Lowenthal said, hitching himself off the edge of the bench.

'Fine, fine.' Sawyer thrust out his hand. 'Dr delFord, Captain Lapp, here's that historic moment. As soon as Komarov has you tucked into your long johns we'll join you for a stroll down to the limit.'

The specialists trooped out. My G.o.d, I wish Anne was coming with us, he thought again. His pulse accelerated. He became effectively unconscious. With dull surprise he found himself walking stiffly to the end of the landing, clad in the stifling foam-lined suit. His awareness contracted, functioning with all the affect of an integrated circuit. Fifteen million separate metal threads were wired in a crazed tangle through the inert fabric of the suit. Lighter than chain mail, but not much more flexible, it had been poured to his specifications as exactly as a s.p.a.cesuit to an astronaut's. Fedorenko believed it would damp out entirely the minute electric field generated by the human nervous system and musculature. The wiring was bonded into fibres of LI1900, a Lockheed silica with a heat dissipation rate so profound that the suit could be handled with bare skin immediately after removal from a thirteen hundred degree Celsius kiln.

The tunnel stretched away behind them, lighted at intervals by gas mantles. Synthetic odours mingled with machine oil and human sweat. Heat poured up the tunnel, radiating from an invisible, incomprehensible skin around the Vault. Nearly three kilometres overhead, he knew, the sky was empty of clouds. The desert sun beat down, drawing a haze of steam from the soaked summer soil.

'Won't be much more delay,' Sawyer said cheerfully. Unscratchable itches raged across Bill's skin. There was a blank, foolish grin on the astronaut's face. 'The research staff must have all their gear rolling as you go in, and they're still not really at home without electrons to push.' A bell rang stridently. 'Okay, gentlemen, that's it. I wish you luck. We'll see you at luncheon.'

Bill shook his hand again and didn't feel a thing through the wired glove. Flanked by their escort of soldiers, he and Hugh walked into the final leg of the burrow.

The helmet of fine mesh surrounded his head, splintering gaslight like a prism. His left triceps was aching. Lungs burned with the fiery air fleeing up from the barrier.

This last stretch had all been dug by hand-wielded hydraulic excavators. The previous slanting kilometres of tunnel, designed to collapse as a trap for radiation or toxic gas in the event that the Vault should detonate or self destruct, had been hammered through the raw rock strata by exquisitely fas.h.i.+oned shaped charges.

He smiled. The jargon, and some of the engineering concepts behind it, had wormed into his mind during the crash orientation. Suddenly, he found the Boy's Own technology refres.h.i.+ng, restorative. A hallucinatory vividness overcame him; he was bent over a low desk in the school library, riveted by a thick-leaved encyclopedia. It showed the brain as a small town business, telephonists with their hair in buns, the Manager of Speech brooding on his Chamber of Commerce address, the Manager of Reflex Actions standing angrily above his ledger clerks in the Cerebellum, the Board Room of the Cerebrum, air tubes looping from the nose to the Aerating Room.... The tubes of the tunnel had been lined with a s.p.a.ce age formula of boron fibres microscopically interlocked in tetrahedral patterns inside an epoxy bond. The adhesives had remained soft and workable until a specific catalyst was added; instantly, the epoxy set to concrete. The stressed boron-epoxy substances were incredibly light and fantastically stronger than steel. In his brain, an enzyme was reversing that process. The thought patterns of decades were melting to a spring thaw. Jesus, he told himself, the clerks have run amok. They're tearing up the records. They've taken to drink. Where are their collars? Is that a black flag they're strangling the Manager with?

'We're at the limit zone,' one of the soldiers said, breaking into his anaesthetic abstraction. The man flashed a signal lamp back up the tunnel.

A bell clamoured. The count had begun.

'We'll be waiting for you here,' the sergeant said in a low, calm tone. 'Begin your return no later than the first klaxon.'

'Gotcha,' Hugh said. 'See you, buddy.'

They crossed the hot interface of the barrier and went clumsily down the ladder into the zone.

The Vault was a dull white sphere on a perfectly flat surface. Bill had studied holograms of the s...o...b..x cavity and the sphere it contained; now the thing itself was clearly illuminated in focused beams cast from the nest of gas mantles behind the limit.

His breath whistled through the wire grid of the null-suit helmet. His footsteps clicked and echoed. In his belly he felt a terrible, pointless betrayal.

The ball loomed, quite featureless. A refrain of doom began in Bill's mind. He glanced at the astronaut walking slowly at his side. He tried to block death from his cycling thoughts and failed. It had killed thirty-seven men. At this moment those who had not died lay strapped in hospital beds under total sedation, lest they wake screaming, screaming....

Bill stopped. 'f.u.c.k it,' he said. He tore off his left gauntlet. 'Hugh, take your right glove off.'

Alarmed, the astronaut seized his arm. 'Bill, put it back on, you crazy loon. Zebrowski burned up when -- ' Grappling, they fought in a mutually uncomprehending spasm of terror. Somehow the astronaut's right glove came free. Bill hurled it across the featureless surface. He gripped Hugh's hand in his bare grasp; his palm ran with perspiration. He held tight. With a spurt of shame, he felt a pulse of adolescent l.u.s.t at the contact. Suddenly the astronaut's resistance ceased. The pressure of his fingers closed on Bill's. He was leaning forward, sweat gleaming on his brow, guffawing. 'DelFord,' he gasped, 'we can't go on meeting like this.'

They waited, hands linked, until they had regained their breath. A primal contact had been closed. A current pa.s.sed between them, comforting, energising. Aristotle and Alister Jerison would be pleased, Bill thought with dreamlike detachment. And maybe Alice Langer. Hand in hand, then, like children on a strange playground, they moved again toward the Vault.

Heat from the invisible barrier was gone. Air circulated across Bill's skin, cooling him, vented from a grille under his shoulder blades. Even so, a trickle of sweat ran from his chest down his stomach.

His thoughts were in confused tatters. He awaited attack from the Vault. None came. Cautiously, according to instructions, they stopped after fifty metres. A faint dark stain marred the surface before them. No more than cinders, ashes, he thought. Hugh tugged at his hand. They edged closer, slowly circling the inert globe. They fell screaming into infinity.

-- fell and fell, knees bent, arms against chest, eyes clamped shut in nausea and shock, hand locked bruisingly to hand -- I'm not falling, Bill howled furiously to himself. There's nowhere to fall. The plunging descent into h.e.l.l did not abate. He knew in some realm of reason that the surface was firm beneath his booted feet. Vertigo roared in ears and guts and muscles. He forced his eyes open. Not falling. The strain was intolerable. The astronaut was screaming something, pumping at his arm.