The Blood Red Game

TWELVE

Roffrey debated his next move, sitting hunched at the controls while he checked the astrochart before him. It didn't tally with the Shifter as it now was, but it would do. He could recognise descriptions of planets even though they had changed their location.

Willow and Talfryn were cleaning up. They were both beginning to look better. The ship itself was hardly tidy. It was not even very clean and there was a smell of the workshop about it - of oil, burnt rubber, dirty plastic and old leather. Roffrey liked it that way.

He scowled then. He didn't like company. I'm getting soft, he told himself.

Now he was going to Roth he began to feel nervous at what he might find there.

Talfryn said: 'We're ready!'

He activated the ship's normal drive and lifted off. He was tempted to burn the city to rubble as he passed, but he didn't. He got into space with a feeling of relief, heading in a series of flickering hops used for short journeys towards Roth, now hanging the farthest away from the parent binary, as if deliberately set apart from the rest of the system.

Roth, more than any other planet in the Shifter, defied the very logic of the cosmos and existed contrary to all laws. Roth - nicknamed Ragged Ruth, he remembered - still contained the impossible gaps. There, two men had become supersane. But Mary, poor Mary who had helped them - she had found only madness there.

Had she gone back to try and lay the ghost that was her insanity? Or had her motives been induced by madness? Perhaps he would find out.

The planet was big now. The screens showed nothing but the monstrous globe with its speckled aura, its shifting light-mist, its black blotches and, worst of all, the gaps. The gaps which were not so much seen as unseen. Something should be there but human eyes couldn't see it.

Roffrey flung the ship down through Roth's erratically tugging gravisphere, swinging down towards the unwelcoming surface which throbbed below like a sea of molten lava, changing and shifting like the seas of hell.

There seemed to be no consistent gravity. His instruments kept registering different findings. He fought to keep the descent as smooth as possible, concentrating on the operation, while Willow and Talfryn gasped and muttered, horrified by the vision.

He frowned, wondering what was familiar about the disturbing world. Then he remembered that the one time he had seen Renark and Asquiol they had possessed a similar quality, impossible to pin down, but as if their bodies had existed on different levels only just invisible to the human eye.

Yet this place was ominous. The men's images had been beautiful.

Ominous!

The word seethed around in his brain. Then, for one brief second, he passed through a warmth, a pleasure, a delight so exquisite yet so short-lived that it was as if he had lived and died in a moment.

He couldn't understand it. He had no time to try as the ship rocked in response to the weirdly unbalanced tug of Roth's gravity. He navigated with desperate skill, gliding low over the flame-mist boiling on the surface, trying without success to peer into the gaps, all his instruments operating on full power but few giving him any sensible readings, and lasers scanning the unstable surface.

Had Mary tried, perhaps like Renark, to find the Originators? Had something driven her back to the world that had turned her mad?

Then he spotted a ship on his screens, a ship surrounded by achingly disturbing light-mist. It was the Mark Seven Hauser. Mary's ship. And his energraph told him that the drive was active. That meant it had only recently landed or else was about to take off. He had to land fast!

He made planet-fall in a hurry, cursing the sudden grip of gravity for which he only just succeeded in compensating as he brought his ship close to the other vessel. His gauntleted fingers stabbed at buttons and he got into immediate contact with the Hauser on a tight laser beam.

'Anyone aboard?' There was no reply.

Both Willow and Talfryn were peering at the screen now, bending over his shoulder.

'This ship seems to have arrived only recently,' he said.

It meant nothing to them and he realised that it meant little to him, either. He was pinning his hopes on too thin a circumstance.

He operated the laser, scanning as best he could the surrounding territory. Strange images jumped upon the screen, fading as rapidly as they approached. Harsh, craggy, crazy Roth, with its sickness of rock and the horror of the misty, intangible, unnatural gaps.

That men could survive here was astounding. Yet evidently they could. Asquiol and Mary had been living evidence. But it was easy to see how they went mad, hard to understand how they kept sane. It was a gaping, raw, boiling, dreadful world, emanating, it seemed, stark malevolence and baleful anger in its constant and turbulent motion.

Mary could easily have disappeared into one of the gaps or perished in some nameless way. His lips tightened as he left the screen and opened the spacesuit locker.

'If I need help I'll call you in my suit-phone,' he said as he picked up his discarded helmet. 'If you need them - suits are here.' He went to the airlock's elevator. 'I'll keep my suit-phone receiver on. If you see anything - any trace of Mary - let me know. Have the scanners working full-time.'

'You're a fool to go out there!' Talfryn said heavily.

'You're a non-participant in this,' Roffrey said savagely as he clamped his faceplate. 'Don't interfere. If it's obvious that I'm dead, you've got the ship to do what you like with. I've got to see what's in the Hauser.'

Now he was in the outer lock. Now he was lowering his body from the ship into a pool of yellow liquid that suddenly changed to shiny rock as he stepped on to it. Something slid and itched beneath his feet.

His lips were dry, the skin of his face seemed cracked and brittle. His eyes kept focusing and unfocusing. But the most disturbing thing of all was the silence. All his instincts told him that the ghastly changes taking place on the surface should make noise. But they didn't. This heightened the dreamlike quality of his motion over the shifting surface.

Ina moment, his own ship could no longer be seen and he reached the Hauser, noting that the lock was wide open. Both locks were open when he got inside. Gas of some kind swirled through the ship. He went into the cabin and found traces of the pilot having been there recently. There were some figures scribbled on a pad beside the chart-viewer. The equations were incomprehensible - but they were in Mary's writing!

A quick search through the ship told him nothing more. Hastily he pulled himself through the cabin door and down the airlock shaft until he was again on the surface. He peered with difficulty through the shifting flame-mist. It was thoroughly unnerving. But he forced himself through it, blindly searching for a mad woman who could have gone anywhere.

Then two figures emerged out of the mist and, just as suddenly, merged back into it.

He was sure he recognised one of them. He called after them. They didn't reply. He began to follow but lost sight of them.

Then a piercing shout blasted into his suit-phone.

'Asquiol! Oh, Asquiol!'

He whirled around. It was the voice of Willow Kovacs. Was Asquiol looking for him? Had the fleet been defeated? If so, why had the two men ignored his shout?

'Asquiol! Come back! It's me, Willow!'

But Roffrey wanted to find Mary the Maze; he wasn't interested in Asquiol. He began to run, plunging through hallucinations, through shapes that formed silently around him as if to engulf him, through turquoise tunnels, up mauve mountains. In places, gravity was low and he bounded along; in others it became almost impossible to drag his bulk.

Now he entered another low gravity patch and bounded with bone-jarring suddenness into a heavy one. Painfully he lifted his booted feet, barely able to support his heavy body.

Then a voice - perhaps through his suit-phone, perhaps not. He recognised the voice. His heart leapt.

'It's warm, warm, warm… Where now? Here… but… Let me go back… Let me…'

It was Mary's voice.

For a moment he didn't respond to the shock. His mouth was dry, his features petrified. His body was frozen as he strained to hear the voice again.

'Mary - where are you?'

It was as if he were experiencing an awful dream where menace threatened but he was unable to escape, where every step seemed to take every ounce of energy and every scrap of time he possessed.

Again he croaked: 'Mary!'

But it was not for some minutes that heard the reply:

'Keep moving! Don't stop. Don't stop!'

He didn't know whether the words were addressed to him or not, but he thought it best to obey then.

He began to sway and fall down, but he kept moving. Then it was as if the whole planet were above him and he was like Atlas, slowly crumpling beneath its weight.

He screamed.

Then Willow's voice blasted through: 'Asquiol! Asquiol!'

What was happening? It was all too confusing. He couldn't grasp… He felt faint. He looked up and saw several small figures scurrying across the planet he held with his hands. Then he was growing, growing, growing…

Again he screamed. A hollow, echoing roar in his ears.

His heart beat a frantic rhythm against his rib cage until his ears became filled with the noise. He panted and struggled, crawling up over the curved surface of the planet, hanging on to it as if by his fingernails.

He was a great giant, larger than the tiny planet - but at the same time he was a flea, crawling through syrup and cotton wool.

He laughed then in his madness.

He laughed and stopped abruptly, grasping for the threads of sanity and pulling them together. He was standing in a light gravity patch and things suddenly looked as normal as they could on Roth.

He glanced through a patch in the mist and saw Mary standing there. He ran towards her.

'Mary!'

'Asquiol!'

The woman was Willow Kovacs in a suit - Mary's old suit. He made as if to strike her down, but the look of disappointment on her face stopped him. He pushed past her, changed his mind, came back.

'Willow - Mary's here, I know…' Suddenly he realised the possible truth. 'My God, of course. Time's so twisted and warped we could be seeing anything that's happened at any time in the past - or the future!'

Another figure came stumbling out of the light-mist. It was Talfryn.

'I couldn't contact you from the ship. There's a woman there. She…'

'It's an illusion, man. Get back to the ship!'

'You come with me. It's no illusion. She entered the ship herself!'

'Lead the way back,' Roffrey said. Willow remained where she was, refusing to budge. At length they had to lift her, squirming, and carry her back. It was only three yards away.

The woman wore a space suit. She was lying on the floor of the cabin. Roffrey bent over her, lifting the faceplate.

'Mary,' he said, softly. 'Mary - thank God!'

The eyes opened, the big soft eyes that had once held intelligence. For a short time intelligence was there - a look of incredible awareness. Then it faded and she formed her lips to say something, but they twisted downwards into an idiot grin and she subsided into a blank-eyed daze.

He got up wearily, his body bowed. He made a gesture with his left hand. 'Willow, help her out of the suit. We'll get her into a bunk.'

Willow looked at him with hatred: 'Asquiol's out there… You stopped me.'

Talfryn said: 'Even if he was he wouldn't want you. You keep pining for him, wishing you'd followed him earlier. Now it's too late. It's no good, Willow, you've lost him for ever!'

'Once he sees me he'll take me back. He loved me!'

Roffrey said impatiently to Talfryn: 'You'd better help me, then.'

Talfryn nodded. They began getting her out of the suit.

'Willow,' said Roffrey as they worked, 'Asquiol wasn't there - not now. You saw something that probably happened years ago. The other man was Renark - and Renark's dead? You understand?'

'I saw him. He heard me call him!'

'Maybe. I don't know. Don't worry Willow. We're going back to the fleet if we can - if it still exists. You'll see him then.'

Talfryn wrenched off a piece of space-armour from Mary's body with a savage movement. His teeth were clenched but he said nothing.

'You're going back to the fleet? But you said…' Willow was disconcerted. Roffrey noted a peculiar look, a mixture of eagerness and introspection.

'Mary needs treatment. The only place she'll get it is back there. So that's where I'm going. That should suit you.'

'It does,' she said. 'Yes, it does.'

He went over to the ports and closed their shutters so they couldn't see Roth's surface. It felt a little safer.

Talfryn said suddenly: 'I get it, Willow. You've made it plain. I won't be bothering you from now on.'

'You'd better not.' She turned on Roffrey: 'And that goes for you, too, for any man. I'm Asquiol's woman, as you'll see when we get back to the fleet!'

'Don't worry,' he grinned. 'You're not my type.'

She pushed back her lank hair, piqued. 'Thanks,' she said.

Roffrey smiled at Mary, who sat drooling and crooning in her bunk. He winked at her. 'You're my type, Mary,' he said genially.

'That's cruel,' Willow said sharply.

'That's my wife.' Roffrey smiled, and then Willow saw at least a trace of what the smiling eyes and grin hid.

She turned away.

'Let's get going,' said Roffrey briskly. Now that he had made up his mind, he wanted to waste no time returning to the fleet.

He couldn't guess how long Mary had been on Roth. Maybe only a few minutes of real time. Maybe a hundred years of Roth's time. He did not allow himself to dwell on this, just as he refused to consider the extent of her mental derangement. The psychiatrists in the fleet might soon be supplying him with all the information they possibly could. He was prepared to wait and see.

He went over to her. She shrank away from him, muttering and crooning, her big eyes wider than ever. Very gently he made her lie down in the bunk and strapped her into it with safety harness. It pained him that she didn't recognise him, but he was still smiling and humming a little tune to himself as he climbed into the pilot's seat, heaved back a lever, adjusted a couple of dials, flipped a series of switches and soon the drone of the drive was drowning his own humming.

Then, in a flicker, they were off into deep space and heading away from the Sundered Worlds into the depths of matterless void. It was such an easy lift-off, Roffrey felt, that it was almost as if a friendly hand had given them a push from behind…

It was with a sense of inevitability that he began the descent through the dimension layers, heading back to the space-time in which he'd left the fleet of mankind.

Meanwhile, men's brains were jarred and jumbled as they strove to master the Game. Minds broke. Nerves snapped. But, while scarcely understanding what it was about, Lord Mordan forced his team to continue, convinced that humanity's chance of survival depended on winning…

Whistling sounds were the first impressions Roffrey received as he phased the ship out of the Shifter's space-time and into the next level.

Space around them suddenly became bright with stars, the not-quite-familiar whirl of a spiral galaxy searing outwards in a wild sprawl of suns. But the whistle was replaced by a dreadful moaning which pervaded the ship and made speech impossible.

Roffrey was intent on the new instruments. The little experience he had of the continuum-travelling device had shown him that the ship could easily slip back through the space-time layers and become totally lost.

The instruments hadn't been designed for wide travelling of this kind and Roffrey knew it, but each separate universe in the multiverse had its particular co-ordinates, and the instruments, crude as they were, could differentiate between them. Over the main laser screen Roffrey had a chart which would enable him to recognise the universe into which the human race had fled. But the journey could be dangerous, perhaps impossible.

And then the noise increased to become painful, no longer a monotone but a pulsating, nerve-racking whine. Roffrey phased into the next layer.

The galaxy ahead was a seething inferno of unformed matter, hazy, bright, full of archetypal colour - reds, whites, blacks, yellows - pouring about in slow disorder. This was a universe in a state of either birth or dissolution.

There was near-silence as Roffrey phased out of this continuum and into the next. His whistling, which he had been doing all the while, was light and cheerful. Then he heard Mary's groans and he stopped.

Now they were in the centre of a galaxy.

Massed stars lay in all directions. He stared at them in wonder, noticing how, with every phase, the matter, filling the space around them seemed to change its position as well as its nature.

Then the stars were gone and he was passing through a turbulent mass of dark gas which seemed to form into horrible half-recognisable shapes which sickened him so that he could no longer look but had to concentrate on his instruments.

What he read there depressed and shocked him!

He was off course.

He chewed at his moustache, debating what to do. He didn't mention it to the others. The co-ordinates corresponded to those on the chart above the screen.

As far as the ship's instruments were concerned, they were in the space-time occupied by Asquiol and the fleet I

Yet it was totally different from what he remembered. Gas swirled in it and he could not see the stars of the galaxy.

Had the fleet been completely wiped out?

There was no other explanation.

Then he cursed as the black gas suddenly became alive, a roaring and monstrous beast, many-tendrilled, dark blue, flame-eyed, malevolent. Willow and Talfryn gasped behind him as they saw it loom on the screen. Mary began shrieking, the sounds filled the cabin. The ship was heading straight towards the monster. But how could something like this exist in the near-vacuum of space?

Roffrey didn't have time for theories. He broke the energy seals of his anti-neutron cannon as an acrid smell filled the cabin and the beast rapidly changed from deep blue to startling yellow.

The guns swung on the beast and Roffrey stabbed the firing buttons, then backed the ship away savagely.

The ship shuddered as the guns sent a deadly stream of anti-neutrons towards the monster. Meanwhile, the beast seemed, impossibly, to be absorbing the beams and new heads had grown on its shoulders - disgusting, half-human faces gibbering and yelling, and they could hear the cries! Roffrey felt and tasted bile in his throat.

Talfryn was now bending over him, staring at the screen.

'What is it?' he shouted above Mary's screams.

'How the hell should I know?' Roffrey said viciously. He righted the ship's backward velocity, stabbed the cannon buttons again. He heaved his big body round in the control

seat and said: 'Make yourself useful, Talfryn. See if the co-ordinates on that chart tally absolutely with those on this screen.'

The monster lurched through the dark mist towards the little launch, its heads drooling and grinning. There wasn't time to wonder what it was, how it existed.

Roffrey aimed at its main head. He" began to depress the firing button.

Then it had gone.

There were a few wisps of gas in the dark, sharp space of the galaxy Roffrey immediately recognised.

They were in the right galaxy!

But now a new danger threatened. Replacing the monster was a squadron of fast, spherical vessels - those he had glimpsed just before leaving the fleet. Were they the victors, cleaning up the last of the race. They were passing on the zenith-south flank of Roffrey's battered launch. He trailed the ship round on a tight swing so that he was now directly facing the oncoming alien ships.

The launch was responding well, but the cabin shook and rattled as he stood his vessel on a column of boiling black fire and glided away from the round ships, having shot a tremendous burst towards them. Something was disturbing him. He found it hard to concentrate properly. Talfryn was obviously having the same trouble. A quick look behind him showed Mary's gaping mouth as she screamed and screamed.

Talfryn clung instinctively to the handgrip and shouted: The co-ordinates tally perfectly.'

'That's news?' Roffrey said lightly.

Willow had joined Mary and was attempting to comfort her. Mary was rigid, staring ahead of her with fixed, glazed eyes. It was as if she could see something that was invisible to the others. Her screams rang on, a horrible ululation in the confined cabin.

Willow peered through the bad light at the two men half-silhouetted up ahead, the one in the control seat, the other standing over him, their dark clothes picked out against the spluttering brightness of the screens and instruments, their faces in shadow, their hands white on the controls.

The lighting was very dim as all power-sources were drained to provide the ship with maximum power.

She looked out of the nearest port. Space was blank - suddenly colourless. She looked back at the men and her vision was engulfed by a horrible disharmony of colour and noise, sense impressions of all kinds - obscene, primeval, terrible - throwing her mind into disorder so that she found it almost impossible to differentiate between her five senses.

Then, when she had completely lost her ability to tell whether she was smelling or hearing a colour, her head was filled with a single impression that combined as one thing to her sense: Smell, sight, touch, sound and taste were all there, but the combination produced a unified sense that all were blood red.

She thought she was dead.

Roffrey shouted and the sound hung alone for a moment before he saw it merge into the blood red disharmony. He felt madness approach and then recede - approach and recede, like a horrible tide, for with each sweep it came a little closer. His body vibrated with the tension, sending out clouds of blood red trailers through the cabin which he saw - no, he heard it, as the note of a muted trumpet. It horrified him, for now something else was creeping through, something coming up from his oldest memories, something of which he hadn't even been aware.

He was immersed in self-loathing, self-pity, suddenly knowing what a debased thing he was…

But there was something - he didn't know what - aiding him in spite of his confusion, aiding him to cling to his personal being, to sweat out the tumble of disordered impressions and terrible thoughts, and to hit back.

He hit back!

Mary was still quivering in Willow's arms - taut, tense, no longer screaming.

The waves began to peter out Willow struck, too. Struck back at whatever it was that was doing this to them.

The waves faded and, slowly, their senses were restored to normal.

Suddenly Mary's body relaxed. She had passed out. Talfryn was slumped on the floor and Roffrey was hunched in the control seat, growling.

He peered through the rapidly fading pulsations and saw with satisfaction that the anti-neutrons had done their job, though he hadn't been able to direct them properly, nor had he been fully conscious of directing them.

Some of the ships were making off, others were warped lumps of metal spinning aimlessly in the void. He began whistling to himself as he adjusted the controls. The whistling died as he said:

'You all right back there?'

Willow said: 'What do you think, superman? Mary and Paul have passed out. Mary took it worse than any of us - she seemed to bear the brunt of it. What was it, do you think?'

'I don't know. Maybe we'll get our answers soon.'

'Why?'

'I've sighted our fleet!'

'Thank God,' said Willow, and she began to tremble. She dared not anticipate her reunion with Asquiol.

Roffrey headed for the fleet - going back as fast as he'd left.