The power levers were in front of him. The grips were polished copper, lubed for a nearly perfect contact. He grasped them, and his nervous system performed a tiny sashay as it was accepted into the biode's intelligence cushion. His vision changed. The walls of the cavern and the sea tunnel glowed with a soft phosphor, as did the underwater contours, all clearly visible through the craft's now seemingly transparent hull. He leaned into the levers, and the craft moved forward. Speed, attitude, power consumption — all the figures were in his head. He willed the boat to go where he wanted, and it went. He willed quite sedately at first, submerging as soon as the bottom dropped away from the dock and then easing the nose into the mouth of the sea tunnel. The first narrow tube, however, quickly opened out into a network of interconnecting undersea chambers. He could guide the submarine and still take in the view. Giant stone arrows carved in the rock wall indicated the way to the open sea. The Minstrel Boy could not shake the feeling that he was passing through a vast aquarium. The sea tunnels of the Presence teemed with marine life that was as bizarre and exotic as the human life up in the Caverns, and in his biode-enhanced vision each creature glowed with its own eerie light. Fat, well-fed sharks glided with lazy menace. Strange life-forms with trailing fronds and eyes that protruded on stalks peered into the bubble canopy. The Minstrel Boy realized that Renatta de Luxe, without the biode-enhanced vision, could not see any of it.
He flicked on the external lights. 'Take a look through the porthole.'
'What are these things?'
'Who the hell knows.'
'Can I talk to you again?'
'Not yet.'
The submarine moved silently on with its lights blazing. The walls of the cavern outside continued to open out until they were no longer there. The Minstrel Boy took his hands off the power levers.
'We're in the open sea.'
'What happens next?'
'We'll drift into the nothings.'
'Will we feel the transition?'
The Minstrel Boy shook his head. 'I doubt it. Not unless the stasis generator goes down. I doubt we'd feel anything even then.'
As if to emphasize his point, lights on the control panel flashed and a warning appeared in the air:
IT IS TIME TO MANUALLY ACTIVATE THE STASIS GENERATOR.
It was a tradition: Human beings activated the stasis generator. One did not leave it to biodes or hard control systems or anything else. Of course, those things could provide backup if the human screwed up, but a man was the master of his own means of survival. The Minstrel Boy hit the twin toggles. The warning changed to a status display:
STASIS FIELD UP.
The nothings came at them like a wall of fog beneath the sea. They glittered with a bright and very alien light. They seemed to swirl with a thousand colors, but it was impossible to focus on an individual color or a single movement. There was something about them that resisted the grasp of the human senses. The gold submarine slid into them. The nonmatter closed over the bubble canopy and the portholes. There was a sheen on the outside of the craft from the thin layer of water that the stasis generator maintained around the craft. The lights continued to blaze, but the beams went nowhere.
It was unfortunate timing, to say the least. Just as the news of the Great Metaphysical Breakthrough was bringing a strange hope to the beleaguered Thirteenth Empire, the nothings appeared and swiftly devoured reality as the humans had known it, except what little could be saved by the hastily developed stasis generators. Human reasoning, being what it was, found it impossible to separate cause from juxtaposition and to dismiss the idea that the two events were related. The enemies of the metaphysicians made great play of this, openly accusing them of unleashing the demon.
A survivor of the destruction of Climnestra described one of the first appearances of the nothings thus: 'It started on Philo Boulevard right outside the Harbingers. It was a glittering patch of air, like dancing dust motes, that hung some four feet above the street. Very slowly it grew into a dazzling, pulsing sphere some six feet across. It remained like that for maybe ten minutes, and then, without warning, it expanded at an amazing speed. Everything it touched smoked and became nothing. Even those of us who were lucky enough to be inside the field of the stasis generator feared that we would parish as the terrible miasma engulfed us, but the ground beneath our feet and the air around us remained, and we alone were spared.'
The theories regarding the origins of the nothings are many, and the debate continues among historians to this day. Initially they were blamed on some alien superweapon, a product of the conflict with the Draan. Later more fanciful and complex explanations were evolved. The nothings were the first phase of a cataclysmic matter/nonmatter evolution. They were a uniquely disastrous residue from the process of stuff synthesis. One particular favorite of metaphysicians, trying to divert attention from the accusations of their political foes, was that humanity itself, fleeing the potential created by the Great Metaphysical Breakthrough, had willed The nothings into existence as a form of perverse self-protection. They were the physical (or maybe counterphysical) manifestation of collective fear and depression. There was also the matter of their extent. For those who survived the destruction, it was impossible to tell whether the nothings had engulfed just their home planet or half the galaxy.
CHAPTERTWO
Theyhad their backs to the nothings, and the Captain had taken away their stasis generators. There was no point turning back. Reave Mekonta leaned forward in his high-pommeled saddle and patted the green scales of his charger. The heavy lizard snuffled and grunted. The animal behind blew through its nostrils, and all down the line other animals made the soft sounds of big reptile discontent; their pungent smell tainted the clear air. Harnesses jingled, and up ahead there was the hum of the armored car's drive and the crunch of its roller treads. The small army of Vlad Baptiste, who liked to be referred to as 'the Torch,' moved cautiously along the road that led down into the small town.
The charger fluttered its wattles. The beasts were uncomfortable. The fully mature male marma lizard was so aggressively stupid that it would charge headlong into anything, but it did not take kindly to a slow pace and a short rein. The army of Vlad Baptiste boasted twenty marma chargers, plus the same number of horsemen, and five scouts riding the cognizant female lizards — although the scouts stayed out of the bulk of the fighting. There was also the armored car of Baptiste himself and the attendant foot soldiers and baggage train.
They had come out of the nothings onto high ground. They were in an alpine pass looking down at a long narrow valley with a small fast-flowing river running through it. The small valley town that was situated about halfway down its length was not much more than a collection of domes and flat-topped adobes. It was neoprimitive from the look of the surrounding cultivated fields, and the small, gray stone ziggurat beside the river at the far end of the town seemed to indicate that religion played a major part in the inhabitants' lives. They would most likely be pushovers, which was just as well — for this attack, the army had no air support. The air pirates who had been running with them for the past two months had decided that the valley was too narrow for them to operate in safely and had taken their dirigible and four small monoplanes and headed out for Elsewhere. Whether they would ever return was debatable. Baptiste had fumed, but he had no real control over the miniature air force.
The army of Vlad Baptiste had emerged from the nothings into a subjective early morning. A pseudosun was coming up from behind the blue mountains. The upper slopes were hidden by clouds; Reave, who had seen a hundred variations of that kind of insular stasis town, suspected that the clouds were probably a permanent fixture, hiding the fact that the mountains had no real peaks but simply faded into the upper extreme nothings. There was undoubtedly a spread feed generator buried somewhere under the town, maintaining the valley's cozy
