all help is desperately needed.”
“We understand the plan,” the Gedemondan told her. “We have had our share of Entries, too, but, unlike most other hexes, the Entries are of little help to you. They are us physically, certainly, but our powers are through training, study, intensive concentration from even before birth, even selective breeding for certain things. These are not things one can learn overnight, only over a lifetime. Speak now.”
“Your powers are needed by us, though,” she told them. “Desperately needed.”
“We understand. Now you must understand that we are only messengers here. We learned of your presence only when we sensed the violence of the attack upon you. The two of us were closest to you and we hurried as best we could. But we are not the ones you need, nor the ones to decide. We may only take the data from you and pass it back to wiser heads. Speak now.”
“Then we must go with you to where those who can help are,” she told them.
“It is not possible,” the Gedemondan told her. “There is not enough time. A meeting is being called. It is necessary for you to attend. Speak now.”
“I know of no such meeting,” she responded. “Who has called it, and for what purpose?”
“Your own people have called it, to plan greater strategy. It is to be in the place called Zone, in the place reserved for us for which we have no need. Speak now.”
“The Gedemondan Embassy?” she murmured, managing some surprise even in her state of light hypnosis. “Then I must get to a Zone Gate.”
“Your Zone Gate is far from here,” the Gedemondan told her. “You must go to it as quickly as possible.
After the meeting we might be ready to contact you again. Speak now.”
“Your own Zone Gate would be closer,” she pointed out. “We should be taken there.”
The creature stared at her a moment, seemingly thunderstruck. It was obvious that this had never occurred to the great white thing; their Zone Gate had never been used in recent memory and so was irrelevant to them.
“You could use our Gate?” it asked.
Even through the thin fog they had placed upon her, Mavra sensed the creature’s amazement and felt some satisfaction. Deep down, even if buried in her subconscious and not readily available, would be the new knowledge that Gedemondans were neither all-knowing nor all-powerful.
The first Gedemondan stalked over to Asam’s pack and withdrew the map once again, unrolled it, and looked at it carefully, then nodded to his companion. She was right. Their Gate was much closer, particularly through the tunnels of Gedemondas only the natives knew.
The decision was made then and there. The two were put under much more deeply and called out. They were helped into their heavy cold-weather clothing, but the packs were ignored. Then, slowly, deliberately, the two Gedemondans walked out the door and the two spellbound aliens followed meekly.
Hours had passed as they went deeper into Gedemondas. Then a rocky wall had parted, and they had entered the warm interior tunnels of the strange, unknown hex, and now they walked in its mazes, hour after hour, without pause or complaint. The two were more securely bound than if they’d been tied with ropes and had guns to their heads. They knew absolutely nothing of the journey, of the passing through many busy arteries and through centers of Gedemondan activity. More than once their keepers changed, but they continued onward.
Finally, they reached an old dust-ladened hallway that clearly hadn’t been entered in a very long time. Just off a main tunnel, it didn’t go far before widening into a smooth chamber. The evidence was such that the single Gedemondan and the two centaurs were the first in known history to be there. At the far end of the chamber was a hexagonal shape of deepest, impenetrable black. It seemed unnatural there, out of phase somehow with the reality of the rock walls and floor.
Mavra Chang awoke, and, seeing the Gedemondan ahead of her and the looming dark shape in back of them, she smiled. She had no memory of how they had gotten there, nor of any of the previous conversation, but she knew she had gotten through. More interestingly, the hurt was gone. She felt clear-headed and without any pain for the first time since the battle, although she also felt ravenously hungry. She glanced over at Asam and realized immediately that he was in some sort of artificial sleep.
“My apologies for not being able to provide food,” the Gedemondan said in a clear, pleasant voice. “I’m afraid all this was put together at the last minute, so to speak.”
She realized with a start that he was not wearing a translator and was somehow synthesizing a normal tone in a throat that couldn’t possibly handle those sounds or shape the words. She wondered how he did it. More interesting yet, he was not speaking Dillian but rather the far more sophisticated and complex language of the Com.
“Yes, it’s Com speech,” he admitted, seeming to read her mind. “We are getting a pretty large number of Entries from there right now for reasons we both understand, and a number of us have taken up studying the speech. I hope it’s all right.”
“Yes, perfect,” she replied, noting that she was speaking Dillian. She tried to concentrate on her old tongue.
“Don’t bother,” the Gedemondan told her. “It’s too much of a strain. You talk Dillian, I’ll talk Com, and if there are any concepts your old language can handle better, I’ll understand.” He looked around. “Sorry for the housekeeping, too, but we don’t use this very much. I suppose we will have to clean it out, though. Your Entries are no good to us, but they and some volunteers from our side will be necessary if we are to reintroduce our species into the universe.” He paused and looked almost wistful. “We aren’t there now, you know. We died out on the last try.”
She nodded. “That’s one reason I thought of you.”
“We’re well aware of what you thought. Perhaps better than you. And, yes, we’ll help, certainly. We would have in any case, even if you had not come— but that unwarranted attack within our borders, that is intolerable. It will not happen again.”
She looked at Asam, noting his bandages were off but there was little sign of old injury. Even his face had regained much of its original look and color. Her hand instinctively went to the back of her head, where she could feel a slight tenderness, nothing else.
“Thank you for whatever medical help you gave,” she said sincerely, then glanced over at Asam. “You know, he has dreamed his whole life of just meeting and talking with you. It’s a shame you can’t bring yourself to wake him up, at least for a moment.”
The Gedemondan shrugged. “Against the rules, really. Wiping a mind is a lot harder than this, and is for the same purpose. The fact is, you’ll have to get to Zone as quickly as possible anyway—your people are meeting shortly, using our own empty embassy there. We haven’t completed our analysis of your information and ours to decide what ways we can help as yet. You understand that, while we have great powers, we are actually pretty vulnerable, nocturnal, and hardly inconspicuous. These things have to be weighed. In these mountains we’re invulnerable, but out there, in the rest of the world, we’re not nearly as effective. I seriously doubt if any Gedemondan could wage the type of fight you think of. We’ll decide and be in touch shortly, wherever you are. The only thing I can promise is that we will do what we can to aid you.”
“That’s all I wanted,” she replied earnestly. “And I thank you for it.”
The Gedemondan just stood there a moment, looking at her with a puzzled expression and slightly cocked head. “You are troubled. You are in pain,” he said, concerned.
She shook her head slowly. “No. I feel fine. Nervous about the future, yes, but nothing more than that.” The Gedemondan gestured at the still-sleeping Asam. “He is in love with you, you know that.”
She sighed. “I suspected as much.”
“And yet you reject him. Why?”
She was puzzled, too. But she didn’t like the Gedemondan’s sudden change in direction toward the more personal. It was none of this creature’s business.
“You feel an equal attraction to him,” the Gedemondan said flatly. “I can sense this.”
“It’s… it’s a little complicated to go into now,” she responded, trying to get him away from the topic.
“You are wrong,’’ the creature told her. “You think of him as you would an alien creature, but he is not. He is of your own kind.”
“He is a Dillian,” she noted, growing more irritated. “You are a Dillian, too,” the Gedemondan responded.
