The Blood Red Game

NINE

The traveller stopped at the sagging filling station, the last human artifact before the long, grey road began again.

A huge, shapeless haversack bulged on his stooping back, but he walked along effortlessly, smiling in the depths of his lean, black face, his hair and beard wild about him.

Kaal Yinsen whistled to himself and took the road North. It was several centuries since the Earth had been populated by more than the few thousand people living here now, and this was the way he liked it. Kaal Yinsen had never had a dream in his life, and when this one came it came with force.

The road faded, the whole surface of the planet reared up, whirled and bellowed. Suddenly he knew he must head South again. This he did and was joined, on the way, by hundreds of families going in the same direction.

Bossan Glinqvist, Lord of Orion, sat in an office which was part of an isolated metal city, hanging in space close to the heart of the galaxy. He picked up the file on Drenner Macneer and began to leaf through it, not sure that his duties as Moderator in the Council of Galactic Lords were sufficiently satisfying to make him live a third of his adult life in so unnatural an environment. Macneer's case was a difficult one, requiring all Glinqvist's concentration and intelligence to judge.

The man had instigated a breach-of-code suit against the Council - accusing it of failing to represent the interests of a minority group of traders who, because of a change in a tariff agreement between Laming and Balesorn in the Clive System, had lost their initiative to survive by labour and were currently living off the citizen's grant on a remote outworld. It was a serious matter. Glinqvist looked up, frowning, and experienced a powerful hallucination.

Soon afterwards he was giving orders for the city to be set in motion - an unprecedented order - and directed toward the Kassim System.

These were but two examples of what was happening to every intelligent denizen of the galaxy.

Every human being, adult or child, was filled with the same compulsion to journey towards certain central planets where they gathered - and waited patiently.

On Earth, the few inhabitants of the planet felt that the very ground would give beneath the weight of so many newcomers. Normally, they would have been resentful of the appearance of outsiders on the recently healed globe, but now, with them, they waited.

And at last they were rewarded.

They saw its Vague outlines in the sky. On laser screens all over the planet they watched it land on a tendril of fire. A spaceship - a Police cruiser. It was scarred and battered. It looked old and scarcely spaceworthy.

There was silence everywhere as they watched the airlock open and two figures emerge.

Millions of pairs of eyes winced and failed to focus properly upon the figures. They strained to see all the figures, but it was impossible. The men who came out of the ship were like ghostly chameleons, their hazy bodies shifting with colour and energy and light.

The watchers seemed to see many images overlaid on the two they recognised as men, images which seemed to stretch out into other dimensions beyond their powers to see or to imagine.

These visitors were like angels. Their set faces glowed with knowledge; the matter of their bodies was iridescent; then-words, when they began to speak, throbbed in tempo with the pulse of the planet so that it was as if they heard an earthquake speak, or an ocean or a volcano, or even the sun itself giving voice!

Yet they understood that these messengers were human. But humans so altered that it was almost impossible to regard them as such.

They listened in awe to the words and, in part at least, they understood what they must do.

Renark and Asquiol delivered the ultimate message. They told of the threat inherent in the contracting universe. They told how this had come about and why. And then they told how the destruction of the race could be avoided.

They spoke clearly, in careful terms, looking out at their listeners from the depths of their faraway minds. No longer existing wholly in any one plane of the multiverse, they needed to concentrate in order to keep this single level in complete focus.

The myriad dimensions of the multiverse coursed in ever-changing beauty as they spoke. But this experience they could not as yet convey, for it was beyond speech. And the stuff of their bodies changed with the multiverse in scintillating harmony so that the watchers could not always see them as men. But, nonetheless, they listened.

They listened and learned that the multiverse contained many levels and that their universe was but one level - a fragment of the great whole. That it was finite, yet beyond the power of their minds to comprehend. They learned that this structure had been created by beings called the Originators. They learned that the Originators, sensing they would die, had created the multiverse as a seeding ground for a race to take their place. They learned that they, the embryonic children of the Originators, were to be given their last chance to take over. They were given a choice: Understand and overcome the pseudo-real boundaries of time and space as they understood them, therefore claiming their birthright - or perish!

Then Renark and Asquiol left the planet Earth, passing on to another and then another to impart their news.

Wherever they passed they left behind them awed silence, and each human being that heard them was left with a feeling of completeness such as he knew he had been searching for all his life.

Then the two multi-faceted messengers called technicians and scientists and philosophers to them and told these men what they must do.

Soon after, the vehicles, which had been fitted with the Intercontinua-travelling device, swarmed in the depths of space beyond the Rim, ready to carry the human race into another universe.

At the head of the tremendous space-caravan the small, battered Police cruiser lay. In it, Renark and Asquiol took their final leave of one another.

Outside the cruiser, a small space-car awaited Renark.

The two beings - the New Men - looked at one another's shifting forms, stared about them to absorb the pulsating sight of the total multiverse, clasped hands, but said nothing. It was pre-ordained that this must happen.

Sorrowfully, Asquiol watched his friend board the space-car and vanish back towards the Hub of the galaxy.

Now he had to make ready the giant fleet. The Galactic Lords had sworn him full powers of leadership until such a time as he would no longer be needed. The efficient administration which had run the galaxy for many years was admirably suited to organising the vast fleet and they took Asquiol's orders and translated them into action.

'At precisely 1800 hours General Time, each ship will engage its I.T. drive.' Asquiol's lonely voice echoed across the void through which the fleet drifted.

Somewhere, out of sight of Asquiol or the human race, a small figure halted its space-car, climbed into a suit, clambered from the car and hung in space as it drifted away.

Now they could observe the galaxies rushing down upon one another. They came together and joined in one blazing symphony of light as the human race plunged through the dimensions to the safety of another universe where another intelligent life-form waited to receive it - perhaps in friendship, perhaps in resentment.

Then the contraction was swifter, sudden.

And Renark remained behind. Why, the race would never know - and even Renark was uncertain of his reasons. He only knew there had to be a sacrifice. Was it the ancient creed of his savage ancestors, translated into the terms of the Originators? Or did his action have some greater meaning? There would be no answer. There could be none.

Faster and faster, the universe contracted until all of it existed in an area that seemed little larger than Renark's hand. Still it shrank, as Renark watched it now as if from a distance. Then it vanished from his sight, though he could still sense it, was still aware of its rapidly decreasing size.

He knew that there was a point to which a thing can be reduced before it ceases to exist, and finally that point was reached. Now there was a gap, a real flaw in the fabric of the multiverse itself. His universe, the galaxy, the Earth, were no longer there - possibly absorbed into a larger universe beyond even Renark's marvellous senses. Perhaps, in this greater universe, his universe existed as a photon somewhere. Only Renark was left, his shifting, shimmering body moving in a void, the stuff of it beginning to dissipate and disappear.

'God!' he said as everything vanished.

His voice echoed and ached through the deserted gulf and Renark lived that moment forever.