A Gathering Of Stones

2

For the next two weeks Danny Blue ate, slept, quelled his sires when they threatened to come apart, built back his weight and strength. And he grew more puzzled as each day passed.

He remembered the Chained God being powerfully present everywhere, sending a fantastical web of sound throughout the starship cascades of beeps, oscillating hums, bings, bongs, twangs, murmurs, sibilant sussurations, squeals and twitters, subsonic groans that raised the hair on his arms and grumbled in his belly-the god communing with Wits various pans. That continuous, pervasive noise was barriered from the living quarters, but back then, when he was living there alone, the unheard vibrations filled the rooms despite the filters, buzzing in his bone. The vibrations were gone, replaced by a silence as intangible and impenetrable as the god’s alleged mind. Silence filled the quarters, except for the sough of air through the ducts, the minor ticking of the support systems, and the noises Danny himself made. The god had withdrawn from his realm.

At first Danny was too intent on his own needs to notice that absence, except for a vague unease that wasn’t intrusive enough to break his concentration on himself. When he was no longer an animated skeleton, though, he heard the silence and wondered. And started worrying. The Chained God in h/its ordinary aspect was spooky enough. This was worse.

He worked out in the gym, his mind seething-what’s happening? what’s that obscenity getting up to? He fiddled with recalcitrant controls on the food machines-god, I’ve got to get out of here, this ship is collapsing under its own weight, it’s a wonder I lived through ten years of coldsleep, what do I do when the food and water quit? when the air goes? What is that abomination planning for me now? It has to be something or h/it wouldn’t ‘^ye waked me. What? what? what? He coaxed the autotailor into fabricating new underwear and some multi-zippered shipsuits for him-how do I bust loose? is there anywhere in that backroad reality h/it can’t reach? Wit’s got h/its hooks set deep in me.

By the end of a month-standard, Danny Blue’s body was repaired sufficiently to let him settle into a workout routine; he’d trimmed his hair, leaving it long enough to brush’ his shoulders (the mane he’d inherited from Ahzurdan was one of his not-so-secret vanities); he’d found his Heverdee vest and his sandals, their leather dry and cracking but intro because the god had put them away where the vermin couldn’t get to them; he oiled the sandals and rubbed them until they were reasonably supple, then began a much more careful refurbishing of the vest.

He stood in the middle of a room like the inside of an egg, walls painted eggshell white, a fragile ivory carpet on the floor; there were a number of lumps about, chairs and couches folded in on themselves, put away for the moment, there were ovals of milky white glass at intervals around the walls, long axes parallel to the floor. The room was filled with soft sourceless light, as if someone had bottled sunlight and decanted it there.

“Hey,” he bellowed. “Kephalos! God! Ratmeat! Talk to me. What the hell’s going on?”

Silence.

“What do you want? I can’t read your alleged mind, Garbage Heap.”

Silence.

“Look, Rotbelly, I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life hanging round this dump.”

Silence.

Danny Blue wiped his hand across his mouth. He waited one minute, two, five…

Silence hung thick and sour about him. He brought his hands a slight distance from his body, fingers curled, palms up. He frowned at the palms as if he were trying to read the god’s answer in the lines. He dropped his hands and walked from the room.

The Bridge.

The visible portion of the Chained God was a queasy amalgam of metal, glass, vegetable and animal matter, shimmering shifting energy webs, the plasma of the magic that was the source of the lifestrength of the god. Instrumentation stacked blind, face on blind dead face, dials, sensor plates, keyboards, station on station grouped in a squared-off horseshoe about the massive Captain’s Chair. Dusty sweep of milkglass forescreen, fifty meters by thirty like a blind white eye dominating the chamber.

, Danny Blue stepped warily through the half-open valve and stopped just inside. Powerdown, he thought. The energy webs were ghostwriting across the heavy decaying metal and plastic of the stations, the readouts were dead, most lights were shut off. Even so he could see sketchy attempts the god had made to refurbish Wits mahiplace, attempts that some time ago had trickled into nothing. There were carpets spread across the crumbled remnants of the floormat; even in the gloom he could see the rich colors and intricate designs, he could also see the film of dust and grit laid over the pile. There were plants in ceramic tubs, dead, all of them. Rustling at long intervals when the airflow stirred their dry leaves.

Beside the Chair the floor was bared to metal, deckmetal plated with silver in a paper-thin disc twenty meters wide, polished until it gleamed like ice in the half-light. A design was scribed on the disc, fine black lines set into the silver, a circle within a six-pointed star which itself lay within a second circle; lines inside the star crossed from point to point and intersected at the center of the design. Hexa, get away from it The thought came from Ahzurdan; he didn’t want anything to do with that figure. BinYAHtii lay in a sprawl of heavy gold chain where the lines crossed. Ignoring his half-sire’s urgings, Danny stood scowling at the talisman. Why? he thought. Though his memory was uncomfortably vague, it seemed to him that the chain and its pendant lay much as they had when he dropped the thing ten years ago. But that couldn’t be true, he’d been back to the Bridge several times since and BinYAHtii was nowhere in sight. Why was it here now, why arranged like that? why? He took a step toward the silver. The Ahzurdan phasma mindshouted a warning: AVOID AVOID.

“All right,” Danny Blue said aloud. “Hey! God! What’s going on?”

Silence.

Hands clasped behind him, arms tucked cautiously against his sides, he moved along the instrument array, examining everything minutely, touching nothing.

Dark. Blank. Dead.

Here and there a few lights wavered, monitors hooked into energy flow and life-support. The god had powered down so far h/it was in a kind of coma.

Fear stirred in Danny Blue, colder than a wind off Isspyrivo’s glaciers. The god had waited too long, whatever h/its plan was. H/it underestimated the ravages of age on h/its material fabric. Even hullsteel was mortal, given sufficient time and stress. The Chained God was dying, Wits slow time-death accelerating toward total dissolution even as Danny watched.

Danny Blue moved back to the central bank of instruments. An impulse to try taking control of the computer stirred in him-that was Daniel Akamarino fighting to surface, the Akamarino phasma retreating to memories of a reality so different that his reactions had no connection to what Danny Blue had to cope with; even with all he’d seen since he’d been pulled into this reality, down deep Daniel then and his phasma now simply didn’t believe in magic and wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, incorporate it into his worldview. Danny clamped down hard on his half-sire’s urge, knowing it for the stupidity it was. He moved away to stand at the edge of the silver, staring down at BinYAHtii.

The Ahzurdan phasma stirred uneasily; he was uncomfortable this close to the Hexa; his anxiety sent cold chills down Danny Blue’s spine. Daniel Akamarino was trying to be heard, saying: Pattern a drain, set it on delay and let’s get out of here. If you won’t try breaking the Kephalos free of the god, at least destroy it. I know we tried that before. I know the god caught us at it and put us down. It’s different now. That thing is dormant. Can’t you feel it?

Like eels in a sack, Danny’s half-sires were fighting against his control, flexing and writhing, punching at him; he was getting more and more impatient with this nonsense, it was distracting him when he needed all his intellect focused on the problem before him. The Chained God was dying and if he couldn’t get out of here, he was going to die with h/it.

Danny Blue frowned at the talisman; he could feel his half-sire Ahzurdan coveting the stone despite the phasma’s fear of the Hexa. If Danny could get at it somehow, he knew from a sweep of Ahzurdan’s memories that he could use its power to protect them all from the god. From that sweep he learned also that the Hexa he saw was a dangerous variation on the more usual pentagram. Ahzurdan had never used one and knew very little about them, but he was afraid of this one; he didn’t know why the amp;id had laid it there, he didn’t want anything to do with it. He fought to keep Danny from touching it.

BinYAHtii lay dull and red, sucking such light as there was into its rough heart. It was close enough to be tempting, two long strides would take him to the center of the pattern. Rubbing at his chin, Danny looked about, hunting, for a pole or something he could use to rake the talisman from the silver.

His half-sires began wrestling with him and each other again, leaving his brain a muck of half-thoughts, half-desires, half-terrors.

Impatient and angry, he swore aloud, backed off a few steps, then took a running leap into the center of the Hexa. With a smooth continuation of the, motion, he bent and grabbed for the chain, planning to straighten and leap again as soon as he had it. -

His hand passed over a surface like glass. He couldn’t touch the talisman. He thought suddenly, No dust, there’s no dust on…