“But you won’t help us,” said Nela.
The Celerian bowed, tilting forward until its leafy crest almost brushed Nela’s face. “We confess to you: We would feel infinitely more worthy if we could do as you ask. Even we, however, cannot go back in time to do what has already been done by someone else.”
Nela stepped aside, confused, turning to the others for explanation as the Celerian moved away. It paused only briefly, to call, “Your colleague says to tell you farewell.”
“Colleague?” grated Danivon.
“Your colleague,” said the Celerian. “Who in paying our debt to you has indebted us to … them.”
It went swiftly up the hill, giving them no time to ask the questions that slowly formed in all their minds. After the ship swallowed it up, the ship itself went away as it had come, by vanishment a little at a time.
And nothing happened. The people nearby peered into the brightening day, muttering, retelling, not sure they had not dreamed it. Nothing at all happened. The Gods continued bellowing, but they came no closer. The killing machines yammered and gyrated, but they danced in place. The sun rose, throwing long shadows up onto the massif. People murmured.
And then at last, Chimi-ahm howled more loudly than ever and moved back. Magna Mater backed up. Slow wriggle by slow wriggle, bellowing with each movement, uttering imprecations, Great Oozer slithered in reverse. Lady Bland, shrieking and snarling on her great car, crunched a retreat. Little by little, their movements became a steady withdrawal.
“What happened?” Danivon breathed.
Nela murmured, half hearing, half intuiting what must have occurred. “By the time the Celerians got here, they couldn’t do anything else, because Fringe and Great Dragon had already done it.”
“Done what?”
“I think Fringe … both of them went down under the massif and took the device away from the Arbai.”
“They could do that?” asked Danivon, dumbfounded. “Then why did they wait so long! All this time! While so many died? Why did they wait?”
Bertran shook his head slowly, searching inside himself for answers. “I assume Great Dragon wouldn’t interfere in human affairs unless Jory asked him to,” he murmured. “They were mated in a way I don’t understand. But Jory, though very much her own being, or perhaps one should say a being made in her pattern, was still a creation of the Arbai Device here on Elsewhere. Rebellion was her nature, but she could be … rebellious only to a degree. She could not threaten the fundamental structure of the Arbai. And it wasn’t until Fringe realized what Jory actually was that she could take over…. Or try.”
“But how?” breathed Danivon. “I can’t imagine how?”
“No,” Nela murmured, “I can’t either, Danivon. But she couldn’t have done it as she was, solitary as she was, I’m sure of that. I get this notion of enormous sacrifice….”
Danivon gritted his teeth, astonished to find tears in the corners of his eyes. “And now she’s gone, is that it? Gone into the device? Or gone off with the Celerians? Or was it Great Dragon who went with the Celerians?”
Nela shrugged, seeking an answer where there was no answer. She could find pictures, memories of the device unbuilding Fringe in the cavern of the Arbai. Memories of its possessing her at her own invitation, destructuring her at her own command. But had it later rebuilt … remade? Of its own volition, perhaps? Of its own memory?
Had it finished with her? Was she free once more?
Nela couldn’t tell. What had been Fringe had vanished, and the device didn’t know where, or how.
Nela put her arms about Danivon, pressed herself tight against him. “I’m not sure, Danivon. I don’t know what happened.”
Danivon fumed helplessly over her shoulder. “And your Celerian friend said something about implementing human destiny, but how could he do that when nobody’s answered the Great Question!”
Nela held him more tightly. Wasn’t that like Danivon? Not to have noticed the answer to the Great Question as it went flitting by. Oh, well. Bertran put his long arms around them both, laying his cheeks against Nela’s and Danivon’s, all of them wet. Whether they were crying from joy or sorrow or simple exhaustion, none of them were able to say.
In the Core, Jordel of Hemerlane wakened to his newly cloned body, sat it up, got it up, looked it over to be sure it was, in fact, his body, then dressed himself and went into the control section of the Core. A moment’s search through the network and he found the four Brannigan monsters on Panubi, where they were being backed slowly toward the sea. Given sufficient time, the Brannigans would be forced all the way back to Tolerance.
Jordel had never shared the Brannigan paranoia or panic about the Hobbs Land Gods, and he saw no reason to prolong matters. The Brannigan network, ramified and wide-flung as it was, with its personality matrix nodes here and there throughout the world, was still powered entirely from inside the Core and could be shut down from inside the Core. Jordel did so, systematically canceling all physical manifestations.
Lights flickered and went out, mechanisms chattered and died. The spider network of the Brannigan gods lost cohesion and fell apart into its constituent molecules. Chimi-ahm collapsed with a shriek; Magna Mater vanished in a cloud of micro-parts; Great Oozer and Lady Bland lingered only a moment longer and then were gone.
Jordel then instructed the Core to clone bodies for all those who had entered the Core and, when the bodies were grown, to program them with their original mind patterns. Except for Jordel’s few associates (stored, as he himself had been, under the original specifications), they would emerge with no knowledge of what had happened on Elsewhere. So much the better. The less they knew, the quicker they
