Star Quest

Everyone was asleep. Or nearly everyone, anyway.

They whistled in from the sea, climbed high above the city, and dropped down on the buildings unseen in the pitch night. The buildings were of every size and shape. There were spheres of all hues, forty story rectangles composed almost completely of windows, square box structures without any windows at all, and even a pyramid temple. Lights lined the main streets, green globes like fruit on the metal trees of the lamp posts. There were few lights inside the buildings, and most of these seemed standard night lights.

“How do we contact your underground?” Tohm asked, hovering over a giant rectangle, peering down into the flower-planted medial strip.

“Same way I always did before, I guess. The Old Man would have kept the same headquarters. We operate from caves.”

“But,” Tohm said, “I thought you transferred only the city. How far down did you move things?”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“Try me.”

“Well, the city is, in a strange way, an entity. It is connected, each building to the other, each lamp post to the sewers, and — in the mind of we Muties — the caves are also an integral part. When we pictured the city, we pictured the caves with it just in case we failed— as we did — and needed the caves later.”

“But there was no hole in the ground where you uprooted the city,” Tohm said.

A hovercraft sped by on the boulevard below.

“Oh, it's not actually uprooted, as you're thinking of it. It just never was in that spot as far as space-time laws are concerned. When we found that we could not push it through the Fringe, we allowed the space-time currents to sway it, moving with them, placing the city in another location that could, by natural laws, accept it. For all intents and purposes, the city has always been in this spot.”

“Okay, I don't understand. You were right.”

Hunk swiveled his face about on the shoulder that was not his. “East. Slowly. When I see the building, I'll tell you. The longer we stay out in sight, the more dangerous for the Mutie cause as well as our lives.”

Tohm banked himself by extending an arm and tilting it like a wing, leveled off, and coasted slowly across the roofs of the buildings, rising and dropping with the man-made topography.

“There,” Hunk said at last. “That mauve stone without windows.”

“What is it?

“Local court house. Drift in to the wall, then hug the shadows to the ground.”

Tohm did as ordered. The Mutie head was beginning to feel like a ton weight on even his massive shoulders. He was in just as much of a hurry as Hunk to get into those caves and relieved of his burden. He eased down, constantly searching the sidewalk below for late night citizens. Every city had its night people. On Earth, the night people partied until all hours of the morning. On Chona, they pulled practical jokes for people to find and stumble onto in the morning. On Frye, they sucked blood (the very, very night people). And here on Basa II, a Romaghin planet, they killed Muties. And men who aided Muties.

They settled into an alley illuminated only by a faint blue bulb that cast a double set of shadows for everything. If he looked at the ground, his shadow made him an odd creature indeed, two bodies and four heads. Siamese twins, two-headed.

“That grating at the end of the alley,” Hunk said, raising a tentacle and waving it at an area below the light.

Tohm advanced and stood on the grill. A draft of warm, dry air trickled up. “Now what?”

Hunk seemed to be counting the bricks. Shaking a tentacle out, he lingered over the smooth surface of the stone, tapping it out like a blind man reading braille. “This one, I believe.” Bending the tentacle against it, he pushed. The brick popped in, held an inch deeper than the surrounding blocks, hummed slightly.

“What—” Tohm began.

Then the brick snapped back out, the grating fell away, and they were dropping through darkness. Down.

Down through the sable-hued tunnel, they dropped. Darkness covered by neatly painted layers of blackness, lacquered over with Stygian pigment and laminated in jet, pitch, crow, ebony. The blackest place Tohm had ever been in. It brought ancient fears boiling into his mind, his heart, roiling over one another with bared fangs. His people had not long been from the cave. The memory of fanged things and clawed things, of man-eaters and child stealers was still strong in his mind, in his racial memory. He wanted to scream and flail, but he saw that Hunk was not perturbed, and he managed to divine that this was supposed to happen. He held his natural rage in.

Abruptly, the winds stiffened, still warm, and grew strong enough to slow their fall. Giant air hands eased them down, holding them as if they were fragile children. It was nothingness with a sense of touch, drawing them into the bowels of the earth. Again, Tohm suppressed his urge to scream. Far, far away, a small red dot glimmered like a monster's tongue, the devil's waiting mouth. They were settled before it gently, gently. A door slid open beneath the red dot, blinding them suddenly with the harsh yellow light of the next room.

“Go in,” Hunk said.

Trembling in his stomach, he walked in, shielding his eyes from the glare.

“Stay right where you are,” a voice boomed from the walls which he was just now beginning to see.

“Don't move an inch,” Hunk advised.

He was wondering what sort of trap he had fallen or been led into. If he moved, would they kill him? Was Hunk involved? Then the primitive fear called paranoia surged through his mind. He could suddenly picture a situation wherein the entire galaxy was set up just to lure him into this room, that his whole life had been for the purpose of falling into these people's hands.

“State your names,” the walls said demandingly.

“My name is Tohm,” he said, his voice quavering.

“I'm Hunk,” Hunk said.

Tohm could now see the blunt snouts of laser guns zeroed in on them, peeking out from the seam where the walls met the ceiling. Twenty. Twenty little mouths ready to vomit out death.

“What's the password?”

“In the old city, it was Soulbrother.”

“It still is,” the walls croaked.

The lights dimmed. Another door opened into a third room, and its opening brought the voice again, only softer, “Welcome home, Hunk.”

“Go on,” Hunk urged him.

He moved through the door, watched it close behind him. The room was an ultra-modern, comfortable- looking place. There were a number of couches, three desks heaped with papers, a “living” map of the capital, a map of great and surprising detail, showing all buildings and streets, and a number of gray areas which seemed to represent underground pockets of Muties. The lighting was indirect, the ceiling blue, the walls a tasteful bone- white, and the floor smooth concrete. That last brought him out of his contemplative reverie. For all its apparent luxury, the room was still a rebel stronghold, a place where the business of overthrowing a world — several worlds — was carried on.

And there were people. Or, rather, Muties. A fellow about Tohm's age moved forward. He was thin, his face creased with heavy lines of worry — and he had no eyes. In place of orbs, two splotches of gray tissue lay in the sockets, pulsing now and then with various shades of yellow. “Welcome, Hunk. We thought you were dead.”

“As good as. Tohm here saved my lif e.”

The eyeless man turned to “stare” at Tohm. “Tohm, I'm Corgi Senyo. Those are two words which mean 'bat eyes' in my native tongue. I'm the… well, manager of this link in the underground. I thank you for all of us. Hunk is a valuable man as well as a friend.”

Tohm flushed. “He said you would help me.”

“He comes from a primitive world,” Hunk explained. “He was kidnapped by the Romaghins for use in their Jumbos. He knows nothing of our plight. He wants to help to find his woman, who was also kidnapped, and probably brought here to be sold. I said that we would help him find her.”

“Of course,” Corgi said. “Certainly.”

“Her name was Tarnilee,” Tohm managed to say. He was not quite able to believe that he had found an