THE RUN TO CHAOS KEEP
by Jack L. Chalker
For the lateCatherine “C.L.” Moore,who showed us how it’s doneover fifty years ago.
When writing the three volumes of The Quintara Marathon, I immediately ran into the problem of representing nonverbal communications. In the book we have various characters and creatures, some of whom communicate in whole or in part directly with the mind of another. When added to internalized dialogue, this began to make for a page that was both confusing and typographically unwieldy.
The late George O. Smith, when faced with this problem, decided that the easiest way to resolve this was to use a different dialogue delimiter so that the reader would instantly know which communications were verbal and which were mind-to-mind. I have often marveled that others never took up this practice, but it seems practical here and throughout The Quintara Marathon. Thus, to alert you, text delimited by opposing carets, or “arrows” as they are sometimes called (e.g. <Watch out on your left!>), is telepathic or mind-to-mind dialogue throughout this book, joining the traditional “Watch out!” for verbal communications and Better watch out (no delimiters) for internalized dialogue. It might jar right at the start, but as, every once in a while, all sorts of furious dialogue flies in all directions, I think you’ll find it remarkably easy to get used to, and certainly preferable to the alternatives.
Jack L. Chalker
AN ANGUISHED, GHOSTLY SPECTRE TRAPPED IN Hell had summoned them to this remote place, and, worst of all, it was a collect call.
“All ships . . . any ships . . . Exchange registry . . . This is Research Vessel Wabaugh. Coordinates based on spacial map frontier zone one one four eight two stroke five. Coordinates are Rainbow Bridge. Send assistance fast. They’re all dead. They’re all in there with the demons and they’re all dead. Only one left. Can’t leave. Approach with extreme caution! Power adequate for maintenance only. Any Exchange registry. Approach with caution. Demons at Rainbow Bridge! Coordinates . . . ”
The blue and green world below them looked so tranquil, so placid, that it seemed as if nothing could disturb its quiet beauty, but they were an Arm of the gods of the Mizlaplan, a holy gathering in Inquisition assembly, and they had already risked much to get this far.
Although, by treaty, the Mizlaplanian survival suit was officially categorized as “gold in color,” that was simply to get around different racial perceptions of color. The suits were not shiny, but rather dull, more a darker shade of yellow with just a bit of orange than golden. The form-fitted suits, customized for each individual, differed only in detail from those used by the other two great empires, the Mycohl and the Exchange, but for color, of course. Captain Gun Roh Chin, master of the Mizlaplanian freighter Faith of Gorusu, graduate of the Naval Institute, now an Instrument of the Arm of the Holy Inquisition, looked at them all in their fairly bright suits and wished that the diplomats had insisted on charcoal; he felt like a beacon in the damned thing, or a very good target. They had been forced into this desolate and isolated frontier sector of space on orders; to get here, they had been forced to cross Mycohlian space at its narrowest point, and, narrow or not, were two empires away from home and doubly illegal.
Even though Chin timed his drop and his thrust perfectly, it took him close to thirty precious minutes to maneuver up to the Exchange ship, and, when he did, he found it with beacons and running lights off and no sign of power.
The ship was an impressive sight nonetheless, framed against the blue-green and white backdrop of the planet below; clearly a research and supply, rather than military, vessel, it floated suspended between the planet and the stars, looking very, very lonely.
“It doesn’t look damaged,” Krisha the Holy Mendoro, the dark beauty who was both priestess and Arm security officer, noted, trying to see what detail she could. “I am telepathically scanning, and I get nothing at all.”
“Nor I,” added Savin the Holy Peshwa, who was a powerful empath. Empaths often received things at far greater distance than telepaths, although, in both cases, they weren’t expecting to feel or monitor anything intelligible—just some sign that there was life aboard. “It feels like a dead ship.”
Savin was a Mesok, a huge humanoid creature with a hard, rubbery reptilian skin, nasty yellow eyes like some giant cat’s, with big, bony hands whose fingers and toes ended in suckers at their tips, and big, bony, dish-like ears that seemed glued onto the top of his angular head. He was a fearsome-looking one, all green and black, with enormous teeth that showed even with his mouth closed, and his very sight was intimidating as a vision of Hell. There wasn’t one of them who didn’t give prayers of thanks every time they looked at him that he was on their side.
Manya the Holy Szin looked up from her instrument cluster. “It is a dead ship,” she told them. “No power levels at all. Even the emergencies have been drained. Only the broadcast emergency transponder, which is opposite the planet’s surface, shows any energy at all. It is inert. No life forms, no internal power. We will have to cut through an airlock just to board her.”
Manya, the science officer of the Arm, was a Gnoll—short, squat, barrel-chested gnomes with snake-like forked tongues, huge pointed ears that stuck up on both sides of their heads, and with gray skin like an elephant’s hide and twice as tough. But they and Terrans could eat the same foods, tended to share a liking for sweets, had similar biological systems, and weren’t as far apart in the evolutionary way as they seemed on the surface.
“You’re certain of that, Manya?” Morok pressed her. “No life, no internal power? It can’t just be shielded?”
Morok the Holy Ladue was tall, frail-looking, and quite bird-like in appearance, his tiny hands at the end of the long, leathery wings that could actually be used to fly—in the right gravity and environment—and the leader of the Arm. Still, there was also something reptilian about him, at least subjectively to Terrans, and this came across in his constant cool, seemingly dispassionate manner.
“No. If there were any attempts at shielding of that sort then the shields themselves would register,” the science officer replied. “There is nothing alive aboard. Even its computers are out.”
“Somebody survived whatever it was,” Krisha noted. “Somebody sent that message along with the distress beacon.”
“Yes, but how long ago?” Gun Roh Chin asked her. “Many days, certainly. Perhaps longer. With life support down, they might not have been able to find a way to keep going. They might have lost hope after nobody came. They might have gone mad.”
Savin’s huge eyes scanned the surface of the research vessel. “Holiness—the escape pods are still intact as well. Not a one has been fired. Not even the ones away from the surface that show some trickle charge—enough to use manually.”
“Yes? So?” Morok was more spooked than irritated. They all were.
“Holiness—at least a few near the transponder are almost certainly usable, power drain or not. They weren’t used. The first implication is that whatever happened here happened very quickly and to everyone. Everyone but one. He, she, it—whatever—survived, possibly by being in the only place near the transponder that’s still active, and was possibly only knocked out when everyone and everything else went. They would likely not have a huge crew on this sort of ship anyway. That person is not aboard now, or, if aboard, died there. Died there right next to a getaway system. Or got away without using the pods.”
Gun Roh Chin nodded. “The pod would have taken him to the nearest survivable planet. We assume that they wouldn’t assign races to this who couldn’t survive down there, since the climate, atmosphere, and the like have measured safe for us. It would have taken our survivor to the surface, with enough supplies and shelter for a month or more. That means . . . ”
“It means,” Krisha finished for him, “that he chose to die, either horribly or by his own hand, rather than go down to that world.”
“There is a shuttle missing,” Morok noted. “I saw its empty nesting bay on the underside.”
“Within range of whatever it was, though,” Savin pointed out. “I would assume that the shuttle was on the surface with the main scientific party. Since whatever killed this ship came from down there, I think it highly unlikely that anyone there risked flying up here to get that survivor off. Or was able to.”
“Do you want to board her?” Chin asked them.
“Yes,” responded Morok, “but not now. If there is no life aboard, we must first determine if there is still life below.”
“Well, there is surely something below,” Manya commented. “The energy pattern on the ship clearly indicates that it took a jolt of almost inconceivable power, pure energy, from a point below on the surface. It shorted out all the systems, shorted the computers, and most likely electrocuted almost everyone. Our survivor was probably the only one in some sort of insulated situation and so did not get the full jolt.”
“If I am to be electrocuted, I should rather know who is doing it to me, and why,” Morok said in a flat, hollow tone. “Take it down, Captain. Land at their camp below. Everyone check suits and weapons. Yes, again. Now!”
It wasn’t difficult to find the camp below. It was a world covered with trees and seas, but the camp appeared to be the only sign of any animal life on it. There were a number of temporary, prefabricated structures down there as well as parabolic communications antennae, all of which were easy to spot
“A standard scientific field station, not much different than the way we would do it,” Manya told them. “The only thing I cannot understand is that large—house, or building, or whatever it is. It is of a totally different design than the others and looks quite permanent. In fact it almost looks as if it were tooled from a single, unimaginably huge quartz-like crystal.”
“More likely the object under study,” Morok guessed. “Is it the odd light or my eyes, or does that—thing—seem slightly different, almost as if it moved?”’
“I have been plotting it,” Manya reported. “It does change, somehow. Not really in mass or even dimensions, but subtly, in detail.”
“Could it be alive?”
“It might be—but if it is, it is like nothing we know as life in any form. I simply do not know what it is, and I suspect that they didn’t either. That is why they are here.”
“The base station has normal power,” Chin noted. “Looks rather cozy, in fact. But we’re not being scanned by anything I can detect. It’s as if everybody down there is asleep. Ah—see! Their shuttle’s there, in that clearing. I think I can put down close to it. No use in sneaking up. If anything’s left alive down here, it certainly knows we’re here by now and should come out and welcome us with open arms.”
There was no welcoming committee. They put on their helmets, pressurized, and went out even though all the instrumentation said that the air was perfectly safe and the temperature was quite pleasant. Until they knew more, none of them wanted to take anything for granted.
“Dead like the ship,” Krisha said. “Nothing. I get nothing at all. Savin?”
“The same, although I do get some very odd intermittent sensations from the area of that object there. I can’t really explain the sensation. It’s not like anything I have ever experienced before. Whatever it is, I do not think it is directed at us.”
“That will have to do for now,” Morok told him. “Check out their shuttle first, then the prefabs, one at a time. Use caution, keep weapons drawn.”
Gun Roh Chin took the shuttle. It wasn’t difficult to enter, and, inside, he found it rather bizarrely arranged but nothing he could not have figured out. It was clearly not designed to be flown by humans, although there were two human-shaped seats in the rear. The rest he put down to different designs and a different shuttle design philosophy. Still, he could tell almost from the moment he entered that it was powered, fully charged, and could be operational with a few flicks of a few switches.
“Shuttle is perfect and operational,” he reported through his helmet radio.
“Then it could have picked up our survivor,” Morok came back.
“Unlikely. Without power up there, they’d have had to cut away the outer airlock faceplate to get to the manual controls. They didn’t. This thing was here before and it’s been here all the time.”
“The square prefab! Come quickly!” Krisha shouted.
They were all there on the run as soon as they got their bearings, piling into the door and then stopping dead just inside.
“May the gods embrace their innocent souls and reincarnate them to a life of peace,” Morok intoned.
Gun Roh Chin was not prayerful. Even protected from the stench by his suit, he still wanted to throw up.
Savin bent down over a bloody form. “Krisha, exobiology is not my strong point, but isn’t the human heart mounted roughly in the central chest cavity?”
Krisha swallowed hard. “Yes, roughly. What . . . ?”
The huge Mesok grabbed a shock of white hair atop the head of a Terran corpse, its face locked in a horrible and grotesque death mask, and yanked it up unceremoniously so that the chest was exposed.
The central area of the chest had been literally torn open, as if by some wild creature, possibly, even probably, while the man had been still alive. They all caught their breaths, but Manya scurried over and began using her portable instruments to examine the awful-looking wound. Even the tough, fanatical Gnoll seemed a bit shaky, though.
“It . . . has been torn from his chest,” she managed. “Several of the others have equivalent mutilations. Something with great strength just pushed them down, like a child’s plaything, and either ripped or tore key organs out of them.”
“How long have they been dead?” Morok asked her.
“Seven days at least. This happened at least seven days ago. The bodies are dried up and beginning decomposition.”
Gun Roh Chin wanted to avoid the sight of the research party, its nice little lab smeared in red human blood, and Zalerian green, and gray, and purple, and other colors of other races who had been here. He walked over to the far side of the lab and began to examine a huge hole that had seemingly been smashed into the wall around what had once been a window. He pushed away where the debris had bent inward and looked out at the strange, slightly changing, translucent structure just beyond.
In the small administration hut there was much the same, only here the door had simply been kicked or blown in. Here, too, were apparently several armed security officers, and this apparently had been, along with a couple found outside, the only armed members of the party. Some had clearly gotten off a lot of shots, and they looked, even in their present condition, to be the kind who didn’t miss.
Whatever had come out of that thing and killed them was hardly subtle; it had just come, on and on, oblivious to anything that they could do.
He had been around, seen hundreds of worlds and races, seen violence and cruelty as well as gentleness and good, but he had never seen anything like this.
“Something big,” Kelly Morgan had told him. Something perhaps too big, even for them.
Krisha called to him. “Captain, I hate to ask, but I need you. We’ve found the depository recordings and none of us can read the writing to tell which is which.”
He returned to the ultimate horror scene, noting how peaceful and gentle this place was, how quiet, and re-entered the lab.
He scanned the cabinet full of small labeled cubes she’d found, then picked one out. “This is a good place to start,” he told her. “It says ‘Preliminary Report on Remote Autopsy of Unknown Forms.’ ”
“There’s a player in the office over there,” she told him. “And no bodies. The recording system is different than ours. I’m not certain I know how to work it.”
He took it, went into the office, which looked as if it had just been left for a moment by its occupant, then found the small previewer machine. “It’s not difficult,” he told her. “It’s just that instead of the full-blown presentation we get a small representation on the viewer plate, there. Switch your suit to translate standard Exchange.”
The power was on; he simply turned on the machine, inserted the cube label side out, and pressed the large actuator touch switch.
Much of it was simply a dictated interim report to some superiors back home, probably a record copy, but the small, three-dimensional images it projected of the research materials told them something.
“Subject A is a male of the species, 2.4381 meters tall, weight estimated at two hundred forty to two hundred sixty-eight kilograms. It won’t be possible to totally eliminate the material in which they are embedded without extraction from the estimations. Sorry. The main body surface area is very tough, very dense. The skin is at least 1.2 centimeters thick, more aptly described as a ‘hide’ than mere skin, and various vital areas seem further protected by bony plates at or very near the exterior. Both hands and feet are overly large in proportion to the body and are hairless, with that mottled texture consistent and the palms probably rock hard to the touch although they certainly bend and flex in the expected manner. The talons at the ends of the fingers are suited to ripping and tearing flesh, consistent with the teeth, which contain no herbivorous molars at all. They are true flesh-eating carnivores, no question.”
“By the gods,” Krisha intoned under her breath as the long-dead voice went on. “I am looking at the scans but they mean little to me.”
“Or me,” Chin agreed. “Manya?”
The Gnoll seemed to be trembling visibly, her eyes rapt on the small viewing plate, intoning prayer after prayer.
Krisha looked somewhat stricken herself and looked up at Chin. “Her mind keeps saying ‘Demons! Demons! They have awakened Hell personified.’ ”
“Manya!” Morok shouted at her.
The science officer seemed not to notice, men pointed a gnarled finger at the projection. “There! The full scan! Now they will pull back and restore it!”
The tiny figure, still a computerized diagram, now showed a full figure. Humanoid, big—bigger than Savin by a head—and, slowly, more and more detail was overlain as the voice continued to drone on with its observations.
“Oh, gods of eternity protect us!” Savin prayed. “Manya is right. Look! Look!”
Gun Roh Chin had to admit that even the hair on the back of his own neck seemed to be tingling as he saw what they had found.
The creature didn’t look quite the way his own religious teachers had pictured them, but it was still clearly recognizable, from the small horns on its head to the dull red eyes, fanged mouth, even the cloven hooves.
There could be no question in his or anyone else’s mind that he and they were looking at—not a representation, not an abstract estimation, and not someone’s imagination, but a real, three-dimensional photograph of an actual, in the flesh, classical demon.
“There must have been bodies in that thing,” Chin commented dryly, his feelings at the moment impossible to describe. “They thought they were dead. They put a lid on this because they knew the effect this sort of discovery would have on not just our religion or even the Mycohl’s but their own myriad faiths as well.”
They could see the scene now: these cold, pragmatic, utterly materialistic scientists with their faith firmly rooted in what could be seen, felt, touched, and demonstrated, excited by the discovery of what must have been a burial place, intact, for what might have been the galaxy’s earliest space-faring civilization. They had poked, probed, scanned, and done everything they could for weeks, probably months, to learn what they could before physically attempting to disturb or remove the remains, just in case exposure to air or light might cause damage or deterioration.
Finally, though, they had all they could from their instruments, their data filling those recording cubes and probably being beamed back to the highest levels of the Exchange. Finally, there came the point where they could do no more without physically extracting the bodies from whatever sarcophagi they lay in.
And the sleepers had awakened and wreaked horrible vengeance on those who had defiled their tomb and disturbed their sleep.
“I almost hesitate to ask this,” Gun Roh Chin said at last, his throat curiously and almost painfully dry, “because I’m not sure I want to know the answer, but it must be asked.”
“Yes?” Morok responded, watching in added horror as a second scan was being dispassionately discussed on the tape.
“They were suspended, not dead. They were freed, awakened, whatever. They came out and they killed all these people and somehow also fried the ship up there. Then what?”
“Uh? What do you mean?”
“Where did they go next?”
At that moment there came a roaring noise from outside, and in their current mental shape all weapons snapped to ready and they ran out, leaving the recording playing.
Near both the research shuttle and their own, they could see another, differently designed shuttle landing.
“The Mycohl!” Chin swore. “I’d forgotten about them! Just what we really needed right now!”
“Weapons, everyone!” Krisha snapped, pulling her pistol. She looked around. “Captain—could our own people play that cube?”
“Uh—yes, I suppose so. If we can break diplomatic codes I see no reason why we couldn’t view a standard cube. The machine can be purchased almost anywhere in the Exchange.”
“Then take the cube and any other that might look related. Don’t take too long! Manya—you are best equipped to check out our visitors. Go, but no shooting! Do not betray yourself. Let them go past you and wait until we attack. We might catch them all in a crossfire. Practice the telepathic shielding and in the name of the gods keep your emotions in check!”
The Gnoll was still horribly shaken by the sight on the viewer, but she was a professional, and her horror at the sight of a real demon was no greater than her hatred of the Mycohl. She also had a rather unique Talent of her own. It would be quite effective—if she could use her training to block out those of the enemy with other Talents that might betray her.
“There’s too many to carry,” the captain told Krisha. “The three I’ve picked, including the one we viewed, will have to do.”
She nodded. “Stand back, then.” She aimed her energy pistol at the entire library, including the machine, and fired. There was a crackling sound, and what the beam did not disintegrate it melted into unusable form. “Let them get any information out of that!” she sniffed.
She stiffened. “We are being telepathically scanned,” she told them.
That meant nothing to Chin, who was a null, the oddest and rarest of Talents. Although possessing no Talent of his own, he was immune to those of any other, something not true even of his powerful comrades. He was equally immune to Krisha’s telepathy, to Savin’s empathic abilities, and even to Morok’s powerful hypnotic abilities. Even Manya could not fool him, although her own Talent was unique to her species. Still, if Morok’s mind were read, or Manya’s, a Mycohl telepath would know he was here just as surely as if he were in full view.
Krisha’s telepathic shields were automatically up. That didn’t mean that someone of reasonable skill and power and the same Talent couldn’t detect her presence, but it certainly meant that they could get nothing from her mind. Morok, Savin, and Manya had fallen back into the somewhat effective methods of chanting prayers, a technique that, with their practice and experience and Krisha’s coaching, also left an enemy telepath not completely in the dark, but with far less information than would be useful. Telepathy, like any other form of communication, had its limits. Among them was its lack of directionality, which could be maintained by a practiced opponent varying amplitude as the mind-reader moved toward or away from them.
Still, if a telepath were good enough, and supported by others to gain the missing information, there was no real hiding. In case the Mycohlian was that good, Krisha was prepared to engage her counterpart mind-to-mind.
Morok’s thin, clawed, four-fingered hand, so tiny in such a large creature, touched her shoulder, and she turned and looked up and into his strange, blood-red round eyes.
“You are the sword of the Arm,” Morok told her softly. “So long as that sword is needed, you are but an extension of the whole, a tool of the gods, and Krisha neither exists nor is relevant. There is nothing else; you exist only to protect the whole. No other telepath may defeat you, no hypno bind you.”
<They have a hypno! Watch it!>
The words came to her mind as she turned away; coming, she knew, not from the enemy telepath but from the mind of another being cautioned by that telepath.
<Gray shades of Valdus! One of ’em’s just gone colder’n stone!> another, obviously an empath, just said.
<He’s locked in the telepath to single-minded defense,> said a third mind. <That’s very good. Don’t underestimate these fanatics, any of you! I want them! I want them located—now!>
<They are all praying up an assemblage of saints,> the telepath remarked acidly. <I cannot get a real fix, but most of them are ahead, probably in or near that main building. There is another, but it is both closer and less distinct. They are very good at prepared defense. At the moment I can only say that the telepath is most likely Terran. The rest—unclear.>
<We’ll take no chances,> the leader told them. <Desreth, go find them.&...
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