Stark and Shorr Kan stood together studying the simulator. Beneath Stark and around him, tormenting the whole of the ship's fabric and his own flesh, was the throb and hum of the FTL drive, a subliminal sense of wrenching displacement coupled with a suffocating feeling of being trapped inside a shell of unimaginable power like an unhatched chick in an egg. The image on the screen was an electronic trick no more genuine than Aarl's, except that the actual nebula was ahead.
The flight was no spur-of-the-moment thing. There had been endless hasslings with counsellors; scientific advisors, military and civilian advisors, all of whom pulled furiously in totally different directions. In the end, Shorr Kan had had his way.
'A king is made for ruling. When he ceases to have the courage and the vision necessary to perform that function, he had damn well better abdicate. My kingdom is threatened with destruction by two things, war and the unknown. Unless the unknown is made known, war is inevitable. Therefore it is my duty to find out what lies beyond Dendrid's Veil.'
'But not in person,' said his counsellors. 'The risk is too great.'
'The risk is too great to send anyone but myself,' said Shorr Kan. Nobility radiated from him, illumined the throne and the ugly genies. It was easy to see how he drew his followers to him. 'What is a king, if he does not think first of the safety of his people? Prepare a ship.'
After all the orders were given and the counsellors sent off to deal with them, Shorr Kan grinned at Stark. They were alone then in the great hall.
'Nobility is all very well, but one must be practical too. Do you see my point, Ambassador?'
Stark's patience had worn somewhat with the wrangling and delay. He had been conscious of an increasing urgency, as though Aarl were putting a silent message into his mind; 'Hurry!'
He said rather curtly, 'At best you'll bait your brother kings to follow you because they'll be afraid to let you go alone. You may find a way to destroy them, or use them as allies, whichever seems advisable at the time. At worst, with a fast ship under you, you may hope to have a line of escape open if things go too far wrong. How can you be sure they won't simply blow you out of space, thus negating both possibilities?'
'They'll want me to lead them to the weapon. I think they'll wait.' Shorr Kan put his hand confidently on Stark's shoulder. 'And since you'll be with me, you had better hope that I'm right. I've made some enquiries about you, Ambassador.'
'Oh?'
'I thought perhaps you might be a spy for my brother kings, or even an assassin. You do have the look of one, you know. But my agents could find no trace of you, and you don't seem to have sprung from any of our local planets. So I must believe you're what you say you are. There's only one small problem . . .' He smiled at Stark. 'We still haven't been able to locate Sol. So I'm keeping you by me, Ambassador, close by, as an unknown quantity.'
An unknown quantity, Stark thought, to be used or discarded. Yet he could not help liking Shorr Kan.
And now he stood in the bridge of the scout and wondered whether Shorr Kan had read his brother kings aright. Because the ships of the Kings of the Marches had followed them, were following, at a discreet distance but hanging stubbornly in their wake.
'We'll make planetfall in the nebula,' said Shorr Kan. 'Ceidri, the farthest inhabited world we know and the closest to the edge of this unknown power. They're strange folk, the Ceidrins, but the Marches are full of strange folk, the beginnings of new evolutions and the rags and bobtails of old ones driven out here by successive waves of interstellar conquest. Perhaps they can tell us something.'
'They're scientists?'
'In their own peculiar way.'
The chief of the scientists who had accompanied the battery of instruments mounted aboard made a derisive sound.
'Sorcerors. And not even human.'
'And what have you been able to tell us?' Shorr Kan demanded. 'That there is an area of tremendous force beyond the Veil, force sufficient to warp space around it, destroying everything that comes near it? We knew that. Can you tell us how to approach this force, how to learn its source without being destroyed ourselves?'
'Not yet.'
'When you know, tell me. Until then, I'll take whatever knowledge I can get regardless of the source.'
Time passed, time that was running out for all of them, here and now and for the nine little worlds of Sol two hundred thousand years in the past. The ship plunged into the dark nebula as into a cloud of smoke, and it was as Stark had seen it on Aarl's misty curtain, the coiling wraiths seeming to shred away with the speed of the ship's passing. An illusion, and then the ship dropped out of FTL into normal space. Here at the edge of the nebula the veil was thin and a half-drowned star burned with a lurid light, hugging one small planet close to it for warmth.
Through the torn openings of Dendrid's Veil, Stark could see what lay beyond, the area of blankness, secret and strange.
It seemed to have grown since last he saw it.
They landed on the planet, a curious shadowed world beneath its shrouded sun, a hothouse of pale vegetation. There was a town, with narrow lanes straggling off among the trees and houses that were themselves like clumps of vegetation, woven of living vines that bloomed heavily with dark flowers.
The people of Ceidri were dark too, and small, deep-eyed and shambling, with clever hands and coats of rich glossy fur that shed the rain. They received their visitors out of doors, where there was room for them to stand erect. Night came on and the sky glowed with twisting dragon-shapes of dull fire where the parent star lit drifts of dust.
Talk was through an interpreter, but Stark was aware of more than the spoken words. There were powerful undercurrents of both fear and excitement.
'It is growing,' said the chief, 'it reaches, grasps, sucks. It is a strong child. It has begun to think.'
There came a silence over the clearing. A shower of rain fell lightly and passed on.
'You are saying,' said Shorr Kan in a strangely flat voice, 'that that thing out there is alive? Interpreter, make certain of the meaning!'
'It lives,' said the chief. His eyes glowed in his small snubby face. 'We feel it.' And he added, 'It will kill us soon.'
'Then it is evil?'
'Not evil. No.' His narrow shoulders lifted. 'It lives.'
Shorr Kan turned to his scientists. 'Can this be possible? Can a force . . . a . . . nothing be alive?'
'It has been postulated that the final evolution might be a creature of pure energy, alive in the sense that it would feed on energy, as all life-forms do in one form or another, and be sentient . . . to what degree we can only guess, anything from amoeboid to God-like.'
The chief of the scientists stared at the heavens, and then at the small brown creatures who watched with their strange eyes. 'We cannot accept it. Not on this evidence. Such a momentous occurrence . . .'
' . . . ought to have been discovered by the proper authorities,' said Shorr Kan , and added a short word. 'It may be so, it may not be so, but let us keep an open mind.' To the headman of the Ceidrins he said urgently, 'Can you speak to the thing? Communicate?'
'It does not hear us. Do you hear the cry of the organisms in the air you breathe or the water you drink?'
'But you can hear . . . it?'
'Oh, yes, we hear. It grows swiftly. Soon we shall hear nothing else.'
'Can you make us able to hear?'
'You are men, and men tend to be deafened by their own noises. But there is one here . . .' His glossy head turned. His eyes met Stark's. 'One here is not like the rest, he is not quite deaf. Perhaps we can help him to hear.'
'Very well, Ambassador,' said Shorr Kan , 'You came to learn what it is that eats your sun. Here is your chance.'
They told him what to do. He knelt upon the ground and they formed a ring of small dark shapes around him, with the dark flowers shedding a heavy scent, and the dragon sky above. He looked into the glowing eyes of the chief, and felt his mind becoming malleable, being drawn out, a web of sensitive threads, stretching, linking with the
