Clashing spheres, a violence of storm, a hurricane of sound, without meaning or order.
And this too was gone.
Leaving behind a giant woman with breasts like mountains, crouching enigmatically beside an endless plain.
The breasts swelled and burst, showering milk onto the plain. It puddled and leaked away in droplets of diamond and pearl, leaving a roiling net with worlds of its own gathered within it, worlds indecipherable to the dinks; a mountain of slippery ooze. A slithering womb in violent contraction. A tentacle that sought to hold, grasp, strangle….
“Get out,” said Sepel794DZ. “There’s nothing here. Nothing at all!”
Boarmus woke on his narrow couch, sat up, and chewed his fingers for a while, then nibbled at his lips while Sepel794DZ and several of his fellows hummed and clicked. After what seemed a very long time, Sepel made a sound like a groan.
“What?” asked Boarmus.
The dinka-jin shook itself, reminding Boarmus of a dog shaking water from its coat.
“What?” demanded Boarmus again.
Tentacles untangled. Boxes moved apart. Synthesizers made noises like moans, like sighs.
“We read some of them,” said Sepel. “One by Breaze; one by Clore; one by Thob. They tell us nothing! Nothing! Nightmares and visions and impressions and pornographic daydreaming. None of them concern Elsewhere or the Core. They were made long ago, on another world.”
“And Jordel?”
“We haven’t accessed anything by him. Not yet.”
“Nothing that tells us what’s happening now?”
“Nothing at all. We don’t even know for sure that these … people are involved.”
“Something using the name of one of them is involved,” Boarmus insisted. “One of the … things introduced herself to me as Lady Mintier Thob.” “That doesn’t mean …”
“I know. Anyone … anything can use any name it likes.”
“True.”
“I can’t stay any longer.” Boarmus sighed. “I presume you’ll go on looking. Do you have any suggestions as to what I can do now?”
Sepel794DZ shrugged once more, giving a mechanical sigh. “We will go on, yes. We’ve got a few shielded facilities here in City Fifteen: this lab and one or two others, a flier pad, a few routes to and from. We’ve shielded our own Files, just in case there is a network. Other than that …”
“This is ridiculous,” screamed Boarmus. “The Core was made by men! Mortal men! Basically it’s just a damned chill box with a few electronic attachments! And you mean to tell me, we’re completely at its … their … whatever-it-is’s mercy?”
Sepel didn’t answer. The silence was a reproach.
“Sorry,” muttered Boarmus. “It just seems so ridiculous.” “We share your feelings. We feel the situation to be basically immoral. Of course, we dinks feel it is difficult to be a man and still be moral. Which is why we’ve become as we are.”
Boarmus thought about this. “Sepel, what’s it like, being … being a dinka-jin?”
The main box buzzed for a while. “What’s it like being the way you are, Boarmus? What’s it like being assembled around a stomach you have to keep thinking about and feeding, instead of having your nutritional needs taken care of automatically so you never need to think about it? What’s it like only being able to see one thing at a time? What’s it like being distracted by pain all the time, or discomfort, or hormones, or heat or cold? What’s it like having to eliminate all the time and do other awkward, nasty things with your bodies….”
“All right,” sighed Boarmus.
“You asked,” said Sepel794DZ.
“I know I did.”
“We don’t find being men particularly useful, that’s all, though some of you are quite … decent. We feel our kind of life is saner, somehow.”
Boarmus sighed, stretched, too weary to pursue the question further. His mind flailed aimlessly. “What advice can you give me, then. What should I do now?”
The box hummed. “The two usual answers would be fight or flee. There’s still a long-distance Door at Tolerance. Of course, once people start for it, they may not be allowed to get to it.”
“Fighting’s out too, isn’t it?”
Sepel794DZ twitched. Boarmus looked away. The dink was making a grinding sound, symptom of concentration, he knew, but it irritated him anyhow.
“I was running simulations,” muttered the dink at last. “I found no successful strategy. It … they, whatever, has given you indications it thinks it’s a god, right?”
“Yes. More than indications.”
“Well then, play its own game, Boarmus. Be sneaky.”
“What is its game?”
“It says it’s a god. Maybe you can make it doubt itself. Challenge it to do something only a god could do.”
“Like what?” Boarmus cleared his throat and rubbed his forehead.
The dinka-jin shrugged. “Something godlike, obviously. Like creating a world, or answering some riddle of the universe.”
Boarmus grunted, feeling the usual burning in his stomach flare up to make a sudden agony. “I’ll think about that. Meantime, I need to send a message to Zasper Ertigon. Privately, needless to say.”
“If he has not yet left Enarae for Panubi, that at least we can do.”
As the Dove went down the Fohm with the current, the three Enforcers, wearing their show clothes, joined the twins at the bow rail to watch for the first appearance of Du-you. Danivon had a dry throat and an ache in his sinuses that would not go away. This was not merely a smell! This was a monstrous stench, a threat made manifest!
Around the next gentle curve of the river, the confluence appeared where the Ti’il met the Fohm, a wide lagoon partly dredged, partly scoured out by the quick spring flow of the Ti’il, separated by overgrown mud flats from the main current of the river. Buoys marked the channels dredged through the flats, and the Dove edged toward the nearest set of markers, the men at the sweeps laboring, the captain at the wheel muttering oaths as eddies thrust the Dove this way and that. When the ship came into the channel, out of the current, it responded more easily to the helm.
“Hau-la,” (silence) the oarsmen cried. “Hau-la. Hau-la.” The sweeps beat, raised, and beat again.
Behind them came a clatter, a shout.
A boom had been lowered behind them
