NINETY TRILLION FAUSTS
by Jack L. Chalker
For the late and much underratedMark Clifton,one of whose books convinced me that anything was possible,and, of course,a special tip of the hat tothe late, great Eric Frank Russell,as always.
THEY HAD ENTERED THE STRANGE ALTERNATE universe of the demons in full e-suits with supplies, weapons, and communications, and they had fought each other and faced down demons in amber, some of whom offered them almost anything for escape, while others had simply laughed at them. Now, at the end of their long journey, they were naked, essentially defenseless, and still at one another’s throats.
There were now far fewer of them than had started out, too. The Exchange was essentially reduced to Jimmy McCray, a small, sandy-haired Irishman with a hint of a brogue, a sample of a culture whose homeland, and, indeed, home planet, he’d never really seen, and Modra Stryke, a fiery redhead on a near constant emotional roller coaster. True, there was Molly McCray as well, but Molly was a syn, a synthetic life form created to perform in surrealistic roadshows for distant and far-flung Terrans, with an upper body made for Terran sex and a lower torso much like a blue goat’s terminating in wide, almost cow-like cloven hooves, but she had a genetically engineered limit on her I.Q. and the permanent mind of a small and innocent child.
The Mycohlians, whose ruling superculture was the only one of the Three Empires who had a favorable view of demons in their mythologies and religion, were down to three as well. These included the dark, somewhat brutishly handsome yet arrogant hypno, Josef; the once incredibly beautiful Kalia, whose left side was now scarred and burned, presenting a wonderful profile from one side and a hideous one from the other, and the Julki, Tobrush, a creature vaguely resembling a Terran-sized snail with a leathery rather than hard shell, who could extrude thousands of wire-like tendrils from all points of its body, each under complete control, and send various chemicals and poisons through them as well.
The Mizlaplanians, mostly by being last most of the journey, had fared the best. Their leader, a bird-like Stargin, was the hypno Morok the Holy Ladue, Holy Father to the Arm of the Inquisition and its chief. Next was the dark-skinned, athletic Terran, Krisha the Holy Mendoro, who’d been forced into the priesthood against her will and who now believed that withstanding the temptations offered on this odyssey had cleansed her of all sin. Manya the Holy Szin, a gnome-like Gnoll, a fanatic who believed that the demon universe confirmed all of her beliefs, and whose racial ability to cloud the minds of others so that they could not see her for brief periods had come in handy, also remained, as did the one non-priestly member of the team, the Terran captain Gun Roh Chin, a null immune to the powers of paranormal talents like telepaths, hypnos, and empaths, and whose loyalty and support of his culture and Empire were based on a pragmatic belief that he’d seen no better elsewhere.
All now, save only Chin and Molly, had had their paranormal abilities magnified tremendously by the demon cave where the great crystals they used for transport grew; now all were telepaths, and empaths, and possibly hypnos as well, violating all the known rules of one talent to one individual, but each only master or mistress of the talent they’d grown up with.
All, again save Chin and Molly, had experienced an out-of-body experience in the crystal cave, and a perception of a great path lined with evil at the end of which was a magnificent circular city. Now, at last, they were approaching that city in a more concrete way, if only they could solve a labyrinthine maze of hedgerows, and the evil statues and idols that lurked within to snare them at the end—and, possibly, avoid each other’s team as well.
<The idols gobble gobble numerous as we go in.>
<By the gods! My feet are killing me!>
< . . . maze gobble gobble based gobble gobble obtuse mathematical factor . . . >
<Yes, gobble stronger, as well.>
“How do you stand it, Jimmy?” Modra asked as they sat and took a break in the midst of the maze. “I’m having trouble just keeping nine other minds at bay, with only some success—sometimes I feel like I’m talking or walking one place when I’m in another, other times I have the oddest thoughts and can hardly tell if they’re mine or somebody else’s. How do you block them out in a whole city?”
“I’ll admit it’s more of a problem here than in a big city, at least before,” he told her. “The problem is that telepathy conveys basically leading, or forward thoughts, both words and pictures, and does so with no emotion or inflection. It sets everybody else apart, and that’s the first step in blocking. With the addition of the empathic sensations, we’re all receiving the emphasis and feelings of the other as well. The only thing that’s keeping any of us from going completely bloody bonkers is that we’re all thinking in different languages. Where there’s a holographic correlation, our own minds hear most or all of the thought as if we were thinking it. Otherwise, it’s garbage. Take the Terran woman whose feet hurt. So do yours, and mine, so that comes through as a single hologram, a concept. The common things—the maze, the idols, appeal to deities, and the like—come through. The more abstract things don’t. That’s why it’s harder to make sense of any of the abstractions of the Stargin, Julki, or Gnoll than the Terrans. On the other hand, they practice far more around us Terrans than we do around them, so they get more from us than we get from them.”
<So cut the gobble lecture!>
<No, I find gobble very interesting gobble gobble. >
Jimmy sighed. “Always the critics. It’s like being at a telepath’s training class.”
She sighed and shook her head slowly from side to side. “I think I’d go mad if I went back—like this. If it weren’t for the idols breaking concentration, I think I’d go nuts even here. I let my mind wander back there, and so did somebody else—God knows we’re all exhausted!—and suddenly I felt like I was in a man’s body and I got suddenly confused as to not only where but who and what I was. Only lasted a second or two, but it was scary.”
He nodded. “I caught it in your mind, and his. Perhaps there’s a reason why people don’t have multiple talents. Or, maybe some do—but they’re all the ones who go quickly mad. What happens when two empaths have sex? Don’t both of you have problems with identity there as well?”
She chuckled. “I never would have sex with an empath. You can’t fake anything. Don’t telepaths have the same problem?”
“Empath sex best sex,” put in the empathic Molly firmly.
“I suppose it would be even worse,” he admitted. “I don’t know—never tried it myself. When two telepaths are close and emotional and all blocks are down, your innermost thoughts and feelings, not just the surface stuff, are wide open as well. You risk what we call a merger, when the two minds become so intertwined that they become one. That’s what you briefly experienced back there, due to fatigue, but that kind is never serious. I had that a lot while growing up and learning to handle it.”
“It was pretty scary,” she admitted. “What—what happens if two people do come so together they can’t get apart?”
“The mind’s simply not equipped to be in two places at the same time. Together, they’d have to be institutionalized. Even when separated, worlds apart, which is the normal procedure, each mind is faced with conflicting memories, backgrounds, tastes, standards, likes and dislikes. The result is that you get a totally split personality—sometimes they’re totally their old selves, the other totally the other person.”
She found the idea both fascinating and chilling, now that she was something of a candidate for such a threat. “Have you ever seen it?”
“Twice, but only with people of the same sex, and that was bizarre enough. When you add male and female in there, I’d think the result would be really unsettling. I begin to wonder if what the old legends and tales call demonic possession isn’t something like that. Suppose you had a merge with these Quintara? The potential was really there when I faced down that first pair. If it hadn’t have been for Grysta . . . ”
He stopped, and she felt his odd sense of loss. He had hated the small parasite that had ruled and ruined much of his life for so long, but, in some weird way, he’d loved her, too.
“What would you do if you had to face down another one—alone?” she asked him, worried about the idea. “Or me, either.”
“If it happens, give me your mind. Just let go and concentrate on me. It’s a chancy sort of thing, since the threat of a merge is always there, but if I can combine our wills and build a mutual block, rather than combining the memories and personalities, we can hold them. The individual demons don’t really seem any stronger than a strong telepath; I couldn’t withstand a pair, but Grysta and I did.”
“They launched an empathic attack at me,” she reminded him. “And, come to think of it, when Molly added herself to me, we broke free.”
He stared at her seriously. “What’s required is absolute trust. I trusted Grysta because her fate was my fate; you trusted Molly because she was so innocent and basic and certainly no threat. You and I trusting each other to that degree will be far more difficult, but we’ve got to be willing to do it. Become the Red-Headed Will. Uh—by the by, I never asked you. You’re not Irish, but any chance?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea. Like most people, all I know is that I come from a long line of dirt farmers on Kryion. There was never any attempt to trace the family beyond a few generations, let alone back to pre-empire days.”
“Well, my old home is a pre-empire world,” he told her. “Settled almost entirely by a single culture devoted to preserving, some say locking in stone, an ancient culture. Ancient Gaelic was the only legal language, and the only other one taught was Latin, a language dead long before the first Terrans left Mother Terra.”
“You’ve mastered other tongues well,” she noted.
“All telepaths are linguists, for the reasons I told you. All you need do is spend a fair amount of time on a world that speaks one language and you’ll speak it like a native, no teaching or heavy learning required.”
She nodded. “The basic problem with being an empath is that you have very few friends,” she told him. “That’s also its biggest advantage, though—you always know who your friends really are.” She paused a moment, then reached over and squeezed his hand. “You are my friend, Jimmy. I’ll trust you.”
He gave her a smile and a wink and squeezed back, but in the back of his mind, where telepaths had the advantage of privacy, he wondered if he was really up to it.
<Well, I wouldn’t trust him, or any man,> Kalia sent from somewhere over the hedgerows.
The maze itself was quite large but not very difficult to navigate; it was clearly more of an ornamental than challenge maze, and the only thing that slowed all of them, other than its sheer size, running as it did for several kilometers, was the idols.
They ran the gamut from huge, bestial, squatting bipeds with bull-like heads, sharks’ teeth, and bulging stomachs, to large and somewhat disturbing creatures like no others ever seen, even for people from a galactic quadrant spanning more than four hundred races. The problem wasn’t the idols themselves, no matter how comical or disturbing they might appear, but the fact that they were far more than that.
For all the danger and the near certainty that they would not survive to return home, those from cultures who understood what they were seeing to some degree were nonetheless excited by the glimpses they already had been offered. Virtually all ancient religions and many modern ones had idols of gods and demons alike; it appeared an inflexible rule of nature that, after reason came to a people, the sense of something beyond and more powerful than they also developed. Most of the idols in the maze were bizarre and unfamiliar, yet, now and then, there would be one very like a statue one or another of the parties had seen before, somewhere, on some other, distant world.
The Mycohlian Julki, Tobrush, was as taken by the excitement as the more mystical Jimmy McCray.
“We always laugh at the idol worship of primitive cultures,” it commented to Josef. “Now, it appears that, like everything else in various mythologies, it has a real basis in fact. We’ve known of the existence of parallel universes for some time; it’s the basis of our interstellar drives. The problem is, while we can use the principles involved, we have no way of perceiving them. When we spent that night in the crystal cave, with those countless crystals resonating, each, perhaps by accident of nature, a tesseract, our minds were somehow able to perceive such a medium. The denizens of that parallel universe, so totally alien to anything, mentally or physically, that we can comprehend, have the same problem in reverse. Somehow, possibly having to do with some sort of geometry, focused through or within the idols, a weak point is established between there and here, a lesser version of what we do to travel between the stars. The idol gives them some sort of shape or form in this world allowing interaction.”
“But how could primitive people stumble on such an exact geometry?” Josef wondered, not totally convinced.
“The universal constant is mathematics,” Tobrush reminded him. “It’s possible, even likely, that only groups who stumble upon the correct geometry embodied within their own idols get any sort of results. Still, we use the parallel principle for space flight. That means, even though we can’t and don’t perceive it, for some periods we are within that other plane. Those with talents—telepathy, empathy, and the rest—are the descendants of spacers and often spacers themselves. Our one night’s experience with the pure thing increased our own powers and gave us added talents. Clearly interaction causes change, as if it were some sort of radiation, mutating us to a degree. Among all the races with talents, though, there is a tradition of some weak form of them well before they went into space or were even technological cultures. Some radiation from the other plane came to those places at some point, and we see only shadows of the result, weakened by thousands of years of breeding.”
“But some races have no pre-space tradition of talents at all,” he pointed out.
“Exactly. I would love to run a correlation between those who had such a tradition and those who did not with demon legends. I would wager that there is a strong correlation in the two.”
Josef saw the pattern Tobrush was weaving now. “Of course! We know now that the demons once traveled all over the place, in the distant past, using the stations—the giant crystals.” He chuckled. “They used to burn people with paranormal powers as witches in many cultures,” he noted. “Even though those people were generally ignorant of the evil religions they were accused of being in, there might well be truth to it. And those who succumbed to some degree to the enormous power those other-plane creatures represent, who somehow accommodated it to some degree, became the servants of what were regarded as truly evil religions.”
“Precisely. The idols give shape and form to those who have no shape or form as we understand the concepts, and allow some interaction with our own plane. There is a whole new physics here, a key to unlocking the greatest mysteries of intelligent cultures. It also, of course, makes these damned idols incredibly dangerous.”
Josef nodded. “It explains a great deal, certainly, but only on the side of raw power.”
“Eh?”
“Where are the gods?” he asked. “Where are the ones who battle the forces of evil?”
“Perhaps,” Tobrush responded thoughtfully, “they are one and the same thing.”
<Why must we be tortured by this blasphemy?> Manya’s mind screamed to all who could not shut her out.
But was it blasphemy? Jimmy McCray wondered. Wasn’t the struggle between Heaven and Hell really a civil war over who would set the rules? What had Esau done, that God should hate him before he was even born? It had been God who had wiped out virtually all Terrans on Mother Earth because they were born and raised in a culture whose leaders were corrupt, and who condemned a whole generation to death in the desert because of one man’s transgressions.
And Satan was God’s most beautiful, most powerful creation, second only to God in powers and abilities, yet Satan rebelled. Adam and Eve were created in the image of God, yet Satan had no trouble corrupting them. Did it not follow that, for evil to exist, it had to be present in seed form in the creation? His old teachers who said God was boss and that was that, and who were we to second-guess what we could not even comprehend, were begging the question. Either evil as well as all else came from God, or else everybody, from Satan to us, was the victim of a very cruel game played for divine amusement. Either that, or the gods of one were the devils of another.
But if there was no absolute good, no absolute evil, just raw power and what you did with it, what did anything matter?
It was just such questions that had driven Jimmy McCray out into the galaxy and into the line of work that had brought him to this point. While he’d long ago lost his faith in much of anything, he always had, deep down, a kernel that hoped someday that he’d be proven all wrong. He didn’t need something like this, that confirmed his worst fears.
The world, or level, or whatever it was, they were now on seemed an artificial environment; the sky was black, and had a remote, flat, appearance, as if it were being viewed through some cosmic window or viewing screen. Outside of that flatness, it was dark as night, yet the stars that shone through were vast in number and tightly grouped, and there were multicolored gas clouds and spectacular bright areas, suggesting a globular cluster.
And yet, on the ground, the world was bright as a sunny day, although the light source continued to elude them, and there were no shadows to pinpoint its direction. Here and there within the maze were small inserts; some contained ground-level basins through which fresh spring water flowed, suggesting some sort of natural or artificial subterranean irrigation system for the lush vegetation; other inserts had trees bearing sugar-laden fruits of a variety of unknown kinds, all of which had proven edible. You would not die of hunger or thirst within the hedgerows, but you had to avoid the great idols that seemed to be multiplying as they pressed inward.
The outer idols had been basically all power, attempting to snatch or snare without warning; now the entity, or entities, behind them grew more sophisticated, sending forth understandable telepathic comments designed to unnerve or, worse, to get somebody to make a mistake. Molly could not hear them, but she could sense the evil through her empathic abilities. Gun Roh Chin, back with the Mizlaplanians, was oblivious, and, as a result, totally dependent on others in his party for guidance. It frustrated him to be suddenly impotent in this situation, but, while he couldn’t see, hear, feel, or in any way sense the entities’ presence, they knew he was there, and he was not immune to their power if he got too close.
<Where are your gods now?> they asked the Mizlaplanians mockingly. <You pray to them but they cannot hear you in this place, and what good are gods who are oblivious to your peril?>
They tried to shut the comments out, but only Krisha had success, and that of a limited sort, once they were within line of sight of an idol.
<Would you know your gods if you encountered them? How can you know that we are not your gods? Give yourselves to us, and we will reward you and keep you safe. Can your gods do that?>
To the Mycohlians, they said, <,The Quintara are respected still among the Mycohl; yet the Quintara come from us and serve us. The Princes of the Quintara are but we in fleshly form. If your leaders still venerate us, if your Lords still worship us, why do you hesitate to serve us, who can bring you power beyond your dreams and raise you even above the Lords of the Qaamil?>
To the pair left from the Exchange, they had more specific offers, as befitted the individualistic nature of the society that produced them.
<All of your friends are dead,> they reminded Modra. <You are alone, naked, cut off from even the universe that bore you. You have nothing to go back to. Yet though your friends be dead, they are not gone. They are here, with us. All that is dear to you is here; the team of old can be together again, united, like old times, but in our service. Just prostrate yourself before us, give yourself to us, worship us, and all these things you shall have forever.>
And Jimmy heard, <You do not need to despair; all religions lead here, and all that you have heard is true. Heaven and Hell are the same place, really; it is merely a question of whether one looks down from wealth and peace and luxury into the Lake of Fire, or whether one is in the lake enviously looking up at what he cannot ever share. It is too late when you are dead, as you certainly soon shall be, and you cannot run from the decision any longer. Evil is merely a tool for the perfection of the saints, nothing more. The Quintara are as much a part of God’s plan as the angels, and all do His bidding. Sacrifice is not noble; it is a stupid waste of the gift of life you were given. You could be the new Pope, unifying all races and nationalities and religions. Look about you. The light comes not from above but from within. You could be the one who takes the truth to all peoples and lights them all from within. There is no good, there is no evil; there is only power, and the wisdom to use it properly.>
They tried threats as well as promises.
<What have you to lose?> they asked. <Join with us, or, eventually, we will tire of this game, and spread confusion in your minds, and scatter you among the worlds, so that each of you shall walk, naked and alone, forever.>
The Entity certainly knew them; threats of eternal boiling in hot liquid fire, or endless flaying alive, and other threats more to be expected were occasionally used, accompanied by an empathic tone of sheer menace, but it was that threat of being forever alone and defenseless, wandering without end, accompanied by a terribly cold undertone, that struck the real chord in almost all of them and was the one most used with increasingly graphic variations.
<You have seen us and felt us in the other plane,> the entities reminded them, <and you know that there is no way to the city except through us. Not there, not here. You will voluntarily become our new vanguard, or you will be caught and all that we have promised will be done unto you. This time there is no escape, no other way out.>
Krisha gave as much of a running vocalization of the entities’ commentary to the captain as she could, omitting those words and graphic descriptions she could not bring herself to utter. Still, he had no trouble filling in the blanks, probably in some cases worse than the real words came out.
“Not a one of them has offered me a case of natural leaf cigars,” he noted wryly. “No imagination, I suspect; just the same old stuff we expect.”
“Do you really think that the Quintara are their servants?” she asked him.
“Somehow I doubt it,” he responded. “My logic tells me more and more that the Quintara are opportunists, no more. Remember that one cube we looked at? The commentary basically said that the demons were carbon-based life; carnivores, certainly, but no more than Savin and his Mesok people were. In fact, no matter how different they look, and no matter how oddly the evolution twisted them externally, in the essential areas I’d guess there isn’t a whisker’s difference physiologically between the Quintara and the Mesok. I think that the Quintara are simply much older as a race, perhaps from a galaxy much further in towards the universal center than ours. I think they stumbled onto the other plane and the things it could do to most minds exposed to it and they became so powerful they mistook themselves for gods. Certainly they adopted the entities’ attitudes, but, being of the flesh, they were in a far better position to indulge themselves. They might have deals with these entities, but I don’t think they take their orders from them. No, the real mystery is how the Quintara got themselves locked away like that. The way is easy enough to surmise, but the how and the who are still missing. That and why they were imprisoned, not destroyed.”
“They were imprisoned by the gods, and held here so that they could be loosed against the transgressors if they turned away from the True Faith,” Manya insisted. “It is consistent with infallible Holy Scripture and teachings.”
He didn’t respond, not because he didn’t have a response, but because that response would mark him forever as a blasphemer. What, after all, were all the gods of the Mizlaplan, or anybody else’s gods, but creatures of another plane whose powers were at or near absolute upon lower orders? Who ran the universe for their amusement or their edification, the way scientists ran animals in experiments. They defined good and evil, and they set the rules. Theologically, “good” was doing the will of the gods, and “evil” was to go against that will. And, if you were good enough, you got a great big piece of cheese.
Not just Manya, but probably Morok and Krisha as well, would never be able to understand how someone with that sort of attitude could still be a loyal citizen of the Mizlaplan and its theocracy.
Zig, zag, cut in, cut out, through this way, back that . . . It was a wonder that none of them had yet run into one another. And, with so much sameness, it was also just about impossible to tell one group’s relative position from another. Finally, it was Gun Roh Chin who suggested. “We can be wandering in here indefinitely, or at least for a very long time, and there are not even any temporal clues. We need a rest—bad. And, so do the others.”
“What are you suggesting, Captain?” Morok asked, knowing that it was the truth.
“A truce. We’re all in contact. Everybody finds the nearest place out of sight of one of those monstrosities and settles down and gets some sleep. If you are as wide open as you say, and they are, too, nobody can pull a fast one on anyone else without us knowing. We’re all filthy, and we can’t do much about that. But we’re also dead on our feet. If there is no advantage to anyone, just a freeze in place, what’s the cost? It’s really now or never, too, since the number of spaces free of idolatrous influence are growing fewer and fewer. What if this is the last such space?”
<We’ll accept if the other two go along,> Jimmy McCray sent back wearily.
Josef nodded to himself and sent, <This is no longer an endurance contest. We’ve all proven that we’re pretty well dead even as well-trained and disciplined representatives of our respective peoples. It seems stupid not to stop. Otherwise we’ll collapse before we start and only these things will win.>
Morok looked around. “Well?”
“They’re right,” Krisha told him. “If we go much more I’m going to walk right into the clutches of one of those things without even seeing or sensing it.”
“If they are massed at the end, as they were in that other place, then we shall need all our wits,” Manya said flatly. “We do not serve the gods by reaching the end and then being unable to act. Let us rest.”
<We stop in place, then, until the first team decides to move on,> Morok sent to all.
<Agreed,> Jimmy responded.
<Agreed,> added Josef.
Each of the groups found a spot near water and away from any proximity to an idol. Gun Roh Chin found it interesting that not a single one of them had raised an objection—not the Mycohl, not Manya. It wasn’t just that they were all exhausted, although that was a factor, certainly. He suspected that, in one way at least, this new unblocked openness had created some de facto mutual respect between the teams. It was difficult to maintain an image of the Mycohl as a group of fanatical devil-worshipers when you could read their thoughts and discover that they weren’t all that different than your own. Manya had apparently even stopped trying to convert the rest.
Krisha came over and sank down beside him. He almost wished she hadn’t, since it was very, very hard on him to see her this close, knowing that all of his illusions about what was under that robe were confirmed, and control himself, and without his pants on it was nearly impossible to disguise such feelings without a lot of self-control.
“Thank you once again, Captain,” she said warmly. “None of them could offer a truce of this sort. There would be too much pride involved and too much loss of face. We would not have gotten this far without you.”
“You will have to live without me at some point,” he told her flatly, trying not to look directly at her but instead staring at the opposite hedgerow. The only way to avoid his own lusts was to talk, and talk about anything else, until at least one of them was asleep.
“What do you mean?”
“There may yet be a way out of this for you. For most of us, perhaps, although I can’t say for sure. I don’t believe that there is any way out-for me.”
“What . . . ? Don’t talk like that!”
He sighed. “Krisha, for the first time, my total absence of sensitivity, either way, to the powers the rest of you have is a massive liability. This—all of this—is based on it. It’s the key. We may be facing a flesh and blood enemy, but the fight is not and will not be on a flesh and blood basis. That has been mostly reserved for us killing one another, or trying to. There were more Quintara in that holding chamber or whatever it was way back there than would be needed to conquer whole solar systems. How many more did we not see? Millions? Billions? More?”
“I—I don’t see what that has to do with you.”
“I am a blind man merely in this maze. If we get to the city, and some of us will, I’m sure, and if that city is laid out much like the city you saw in your visions in the crystal cave, how do you get out? Not this way. Even if you could retrace, we have no supplies, no water, and no e-suits. The fire world alone would kill us in minutes, and in any case the trails that were so easy to spot with all our instruments, scanners, magnifiers, and the rest would be nearly impossible to locate in the reverse direction without them. I don’t think the Quintara can and do go through those levels, either.”
“What? But we saw their tracks and tr...
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