Fear That Man

She-hips Co-ore

being… being… being…

Coro was almost to the hole. Sam pushed himself as hard as he could. His mind was spinning with what he had found, twisting and turning to seek a way to discount the submelodies and what they revealed. Coro was out of the hole, tumbling into the tall grass outside, away from the influence of Racesong.

being…

core of being…

core of… core of…

BEING!

Sam felt strong hands on his wrists. Then he was being pulled from the ship, dragged brutally across the fine sharp edges of the crude portal and onto the ground. Racesong faded and did not return. But it was — in one way — too late for him. He knew the answer. Maintaining his sanity, he had found out what the Central Being of Raceship was.

And, loudly, in the night, he screamed.

VIII

Coro used the medikit preparedermics, injecting him with alternating doses of semi-sedatives and mild stimulants, rocking his body in a chemical cradle to bring him back from the screaming and the blackness that bubbled in his mind. But it wasn’t an easy trip. He had succeeded in getting out of Raceship physically intact, but his mental arrangement had suffered severe blows under the uncensored realization of the nature of the Central Being. But for Coro’s expert chemical manipulation, he might have let the desire to scream run rampant and run on.

“What is it?” Coro asked, holding him as an ancient might have held an epileptic, careful that he could not damage himself if he tried again to thrash about. They were still under the overwhelming shadow of the alien monolith, pebbles next to the mountain. “What’s the matter?”

“The… Central Being,” he managed. His lips were strangely dry, cracking and sore. His tongue felt swollen and furry.

“The what?”

Briefly, he detailed the basics he had learned, holding out on the scream-causer.

“It’s alien,” Coro said, his voice fatherly and comforting. “But what is there to scream about? I’ve seen Beasts with stranger methods of reproduction and—”

Sam forced himself to a sitting position, colder than he should have been with the warm breezes fluffing the night. “No. Not just the physical setup of the ship. That’s strange enough. But that isn’t what — what set me off. It’s the Central Being — what the Central Being is.”

“What is it, then?”

Sam opened his mouth, closed it and wet his lips. “The Central Being — God,” he said with some difficulty.

“Impossible! He’s dead!”

“The old God is dead. Our God is dead.”

“Then He didn’t rule the entire universe? There was another God who—”

“No,” Sam said, waving a hand limply to cut off the questions. He wanted to throw up, to chuck out his meals and his memories. But the latter could not be forced away, and the former would have to be held down if only for the sake of convenience. “He did rule all of the universe. Every speck of it!”

“But—”

“But there was a God above Him in yet another universe, a higher dimension. Look at it as a ladder, Andy. We are the bottom rung. Above us was our God — whom we killed. Above that God was this one with a pocket universe of slug ships. When we killed our God, our Keeper, our Master, we destroyed the dimension above us, because He was that entire dimension. The gap created in the ladder caused a sliding down of the rungs. We have meshed with the third rung, and this new God with the slug-forms is in our midst.”

“And as warped as the God on the second rung.”

“Exactly.” He was feeling better as he shared the horror, his cheeks flushing to ward off the cold that was really a cold from within.

“And what does this new God want?”

“To… destroy us.” He recalled all the lines of thought that had been radiating from the Central Being, flooding through the counter-melodies of Racesong. “Destroy us. Wipe us out to the last man, woman, and child.”

“Why?”

“To preserve Its self-importance. We are creatures It never conjured into existence. We are beyond Its control, really, because It is not our God and It is not measurably better than we are. It cannot annihilate us, for It isn’t that powerful. But It can direct Its creatures, the slug-forms, to do the job for It. Since they are vicious fighters and we do not have the power to strike back, it should not be a difficult chore.”

“We have to get back to the floater,” Coro said, standing and helping Sam to his feet. “We’ve got to get word back to Hope somehow. A warning.”

They were nearly halfway across the meadow before they heard the noise and saw the whoosh of blue light that gushed from the weapons of the slug-forms surrounding the floater. A steel net had been dropped over the ball, magno-connected to ground pegs spaced every three feet. A tough, tight enclosure, quickly and silently thrown up — even more quickly clamped shut. Lotus and Crazy had probably been achored before they had realized something was happening.

“The hypnodarts,” Coro whispered, dropping to his knees in the high grass.

They knelt, only their heads visible above the grass, and stripped themselves of all unnecessary equipment, equipment which would have been necessary had the Racesong not prevented them from exploring Raceship. Then, nervously, they screwed together the two parts of the dart rifles. It was a humane weapon. It caused sleep, but not the ultimate sleep of death. It was, really, the only sort of weapon they could have brought themselves to use against intelligent creatures. Each rifle had a clip of forty darts which slid easily into the butt of the weapon, just above the powerpack.

Running crouched, rifles at ready in the event they were spotted prematurely, the blue explosions of the slugs’ weapons neon-flashing in the dark, Sam was thinking of Hurkos. Of Hurkos clubbing that pink slug that teetered on the edge of the Shield, that wormy thing that had been God. He remembered the stinking mush of fluids that had spilled from the rips Hurkos had made in its hide. He remembered it writhing in death agony. Clubbing, clubbing, clubbing with a vicious, spiteful swing of the arms. Clubbing… But he was not going to kill! Only put them to sleep. Just sting them for a split second and then give them a nap. And he was saving the lives of the two Mues inside the floater, he argued with himself. Yes. Of course. That must be the way to think of it.

Wind: cold.

Light: blue.

Night: dark.

These three things swam and erupted through one another, cold-dark-blue/blue-dark-cold like a psychedelic toto-experience show, throbbing through the grass that licked them like a thousand tiny tongues as the scene of violence ahead became plainer, clearer, uglier and uglier.

The slug laser weapon was concentrated on the hull, and although Crazy and Lotus had begun to spin the ship under the net, the beam would soon trace a black line around the sphere and slice it in half.

Sam fought the weariness that ached in every joint of his body. Fatigue, he told himself, was one of those mental disorders you could overcome with the proper tools of concentration. But concentrate as he would, his legs still throbbed madly, and his lungs heaved like sacks full of hot coals suddenly come to life.

“Here,” Coro said.

They dropped to the earth at the edge of the grass, staring across five yards of open ground to the trees and