The Godmen

CHAPTER VII

The impact was incredible. It was birth and death and resurrection all happening instantaneously and all together, with the violence of a whirlwind. Harlow knew fear for a brief instant, and then the very concept of fear as he knew it was overwhelmed and lost in an emotion so new and vast that he had no word for it.

He never really knew whether or not he lost consciousness. Perhaps that was because his whole concept of “consciousness” changed too, out of all recognition. There was a brilliant flare of light all through him when he entered the misty glowing pillar of force. The light was inside him as well as out, exploding in every cell of his flesh and bone, brain and marrow. It was as though for an instant his whole corporeal being had achieved a strange state of glory. But after that instant he was not sure of light or dark, time or place, being or not-being. Something unbelievably weird was happening to his body. He tried to see what it was but all he could achieve was a blurring of color like a kaleidoscope run mad. He could only feel and that did not tell him much because he had never felt anything like this before and so had no frame of reference whatever.

Only he knew that all at once he felt free.

It was a feeling so joyous, so poignant, that it was almost unbearable.

Free.

Free of weight and weariness, the dragging limitations of the flesh. Free of want and need, free of duty, free of responsibility, free forever of the haunting fear of death. Never in his life before, even in its most supreme moments, had he felt truly free, truly at one with the universe. It was revelation. It was life.

He leapt forward, impelled by the joy that was in him, and then he sensed that Dundonald was there waiting for him. It did not seem at all strange now that Dundonald should be a hovering cloud of sparks, a hazy patch of sheer energy. It seemed natural and right, the only sort of form for a sensible man to have. His thought — contact with him was clear and instantaneous, infinitely better than speech.

Well, now you've done it, Dundonald thought. How do you feel?

Free! cried Harlow. Free! Free!

Yes, said Dundonald. But look there.

Harlow looked, not with eyes any more but with a far clearer sense that had replaced them.

The men with rifles — Taggart's men and Frayne's men — stood looking baffledly toward the Converter, the gateway through which he, Harlow, had plunged. The change, then, had been very swift, almost instantaneous. Kwolek and the other surviving men of the Thetis were being disarmed, surrounded by more of Taggart's men.

One of them held Yrra. She was staring at the glowing misty beam of the Converter with anguished eyes and she was crying out a word. The word was Harlow. It was his name. He could read her thoughts, very dimly compared to Dundonald's, but clear enough. He was astounded by what he read in them.

"I could have told you how she thought of you,” Dundonald thought. “But I didn't think I should."

Some vestiges of Harlow's recent humanity still remained. He dropped down close to Yrra and she saw him, her face mirroring shock and pain but no fear now. There was another emotion in her far stronger than fear. The man who was holding her saw Harlow too and flinched away, raising his gun.

Harlow ignored him. He spoke to Yrra's mind. I'm safe, he said. Don't worry, I'll come back. I love you.

Stupid words. Human words. Everything had failed and he could not come back any more than Dundonald.

The watch over the Converter would be doubled now, to guard against any possibility of his and Dundonald's return during the time it would take the technicians from the Cartel ships to find a way of dismantling and removing the Converter. And once that was done, the way would be closed to them forever.

Yrra's voice — or was it her thoughts? — hurt him with sorrow and longing. He was not so free as he had thought. And then he saw Taggart talking to a neat efficient pleasant-looking chap with eyes like two brown marbles, and he knew that it must be Frayne. He felt their thoughts, cold, quick, clear, perfectly ruthless. For the first time he understood what it was that set men like that apart from the bulk of the human race. Their minds were like cold wells into which no light or warmth ever penetrated. They might counterfeit friendship or even love, but the capacity for them was not really there. All the emotions were turned inward, bound tightly around the core of Self.

And these were the men who had beaten him, the men who were robbing the galaxy of its mightiest possession.

Harlow became aware that he could still feel hate.

He sprang at the men. He reached out to strike them, and the substance of his being passed through them like bright smoke. They were startled, but that was all. And Taggart smiled.

"Is that you, Harlow? I thought so. There are disadvantages in not having a body, aren't there?” He gestured toward the Converter. “You can have yours back any time. Just come through."

And get killed? No use to lie, Taggart. I can read your mind.

"Well, then, you'll have to wait and hope that some day I'll get curious about your kind of life and come through where we can meet on equal ground. Though I wonder just what you could do to me even so."

Dundonald was close beside Harlow now. “Come on, you can't do any good here. As he says, there are disadvantages."

The fingers Harlow no longer itched for a weapon. “I'm not going back through."

"They'll kill you the instant you return. You know that."

"But if the two of us came together — if we came fast and went for both the guards—"

"Then there'd be two of us dead instead of one,"

"But if there were more of us, Dundonald. If there were ten, twenty, a hundred, all at once, pouring out through the Converter—” The idea grew in Harlow's mind. The cloud of energy that was his being pulsed and brightened, contracting into a ball of radiance. “The Vorn, Dundonald! That's our answer. The Vorn. This is their fight as much as it is ours. They built the Converter. It belongs to them, and if the Cartel takes it they'll be cut off too."

He sensed a doubt in Dundonald's mind.

"It's true, isn't it?” he cried, wild with impatience. “You know it's true. What's the matter?"

"They're so far away,” Dundonald said. “I've hardly met any of them — only one, really, and there was one other I sensed a long way off. Most of them, I think, have left this galaxy."

The rest of Dundonald's thought was clear in his mind for Harlow to read. The thought was, I doubt very much if the Vorn will care.

"Then we'll have to make them,” Harlow said. “There isn't anything else to try!"

Dundonald sighed mentally. “I suppose we might as well be doing that as hanging around here watching, as helpless as two shadows.” He shot away. “Come on then. I'll take you to where I spoke with one of them. He may still be in that sector — he was studying Cepheid variables, and there were two clusters there that were unusually well supplied."

Harlow cried. “Wait! How can I do it, how can I move-?"

"How did you move before, when you didn't think of it?” said Dundonald. “Exert your will. By will the polarity of your new electronic body is changed, so that it can grip and ride the great magnetic tides. Will it!"

Harlow did so. And a great wind between the stars seemed instantly to grip him and to carry him away with Dundonald, faster and faster.

He was first appalled, then exhilarated by it. He kept Dundonald in close contact, and the world of the Vorn, the green star, the black-walled bay, all simply vanished. There was a flick of darkness like the wink of an eyelid and they were through the Horsehead, skimming above it like swallows with their wings borne on the forces of a million suns that shone around the edges of the great dark.

This could not be happening to him. He was Mark Harlow and he was a man of Earth, not a pattern of electrons rushing faster than thought upon the magnetic millrace currents of infinity. But it was happening, and he went on and on.

At a speed compared to which light crawled, they two flashed past many-colored sparks that he knew were stars, and then before them rose up a globular cluster shaped like a swarm of hiving bees, only all the bees were suns. The swarm revolved with splendid glitterings in the blackness of space, moving onward and ever onward in a kind of grand and stately dance, while within this larger motion the component suns worked out their own complicated designs. The Cepheids waxed and waned, living their own intense inner lives, beyond understanding.

"He's not here,” said Dundonald, and sped on.

"How do you know?"

"Open your mind. Spread it wide. Feel with it."

They plunged through the cluster. The magneto-gravitational tides must have been enough to wrench a ship apart, but to Harlow they were only something stimulating. The blaze of the sun-swarm was like thunder, overpowering, stunning, magnificent. He could strangely sense the colors that shifted and changed. White, gold, blue, scarlet, green, the flashing of a cosmic prism where every facet was a sun. It passed and they were in the outer darkness again, the cluster dwindling like a lamp behind them.

And ahead was a curtain of golden fire hung half across the universe.

"The other cluster is beyond the nebula,” Dundonald thought. “Come on—"

Going into the Horsehead had been like diving against a solid basalt cliff. This was like plunging into a furnace, into living flame. And they were both illusion. The fires of this bright nebula were as cold as the dust-laden blackness of the dark one. But they were infinitely more beautiful. The more diffuse gaseous clouds blazed with the light of their captive suns instead of blotting them out. Harlow sped with Dundonald along golden rivers, over cataracts of fire a million miles high, through coils and plumes and great still lakes of light with the stars glowing in them like phosphorescent fish.

Then there was darkness again, and another cluster growing in it, another hive of stars patched with the sick radiance of the Cepheids. And Dundonald was sending out a silent cry, and suddenly there was an answering thought, a third mind in that vastness of space and stars.

Who calls?

They followed that thought-voice, arrowing in toward a pallid star that throbbed like the heart of a dying man. And in the sullen glare of its corona they met a tiny flicker of radiance like themselves, a minute living star — one of the old Vorn.

"Who comes?” he said. “Who disturbs me at my work?"

Harlow sensed the strong annoyance in this strange mind, too lofty and remote for anger. He kept silent while Dundonald explained, and the mind of the Vorn kept that remoteness, that lofty detachment, and Harlow began to understand that humanity and the ant-like affairs of men had been left too far behind for this one to care now what happened to anything that wore perishable, planet-bound flesh.

He was not surprised when the Vorn answered Dundonald. “This is no concern of mine."

Harlow's thought burst out. “But the Converter! You'll never be able to come back—"

The Vorn regarded him for an instant with a sort of curiosity. “You are very new. Both of you. Go range the stars for a thousand years and then tell me that these things matter. Now go — leave me to my studies."

Dundonald said wearily to Harlow, “I told you they wouldn't care."

"But they have to,” Harlow said. “Listen,” he shouted mentally at the Vorn, who was already drifting away above the curdled furnace-light of the Cepheid. “Listen, you think of this, the whole wide universe, as your country. Well, it won't be your country any longer if these men gain control of the Converter. You reprove us for disturbing you. We're only two. Millions will come through the Converter, in time. The Vorn will no longer be alone, or in any way unique. Where will your solitude be then, and your peace?"

The Vorn hesitated. “Millions?” he repeated.

"You better than I should know how many inhabited worlds there are in this galaxy. And you should remember how men fear death and try in every way to cheat it. The promise of a physical immortality will draw whole populations through the Converter. You know that this is so."

"Yes,” said the Vorn. “I remember. I know."

"Then you'll help us? You'll lead us to others of your kind?"

The Vorn hovered for what seemed to Harlow an anxious eternity, the pallid fires coiling around him, his mind closed in so that neither Harlow nor Dundonald could read it.

Then the Vorn said, “Come."

He rose and darted away from the cluster, and Harlow followed with Dundonald, and the starstream of the Milky Way whipped by like smoke and was gone, and there was blackness like the night before creation and emptiness beyond the power of the mind to know.

Gradually, as his new and untried senses adjusted, Harlow began to be aware of little flecks of brightness floating in the black nothing, and he understood that these were galaxies. So small, he thought, so terribly far apart, these wandering companies of stars banded together like pilgrims for their tremendous journey. Here and there it seemed that several galaxies had joined in a cluster, traveling all together from dark beginning to darker ending, but even these seemed lost and lonely, their hosts of bright companions dwarfed to single sparks in that incredible vastness, like sequins scattered thinly on a black robe.

The thought-voice of the Vorn reached him, a throb with hunger and excitement.

"In all this time, we have never reached the end—"

The hands of the ape, thought Harlow, and the eyes of man. They had never been filled and they never would be, and this was good. He looked at the distant galaxies with the same hunger and excitement he had felt in the Vorn. What was man for, what was intelligence for, if not to learn? To see, to know, to explore, to range over creations to its uttermost boundaries, always learning, until you and the universe ran down together and found the ultimate answer to the greatest mystery of all.

No wonder the Vorn had no interest in going back. With something of a shock, Harlow realized that he himself was rapidly losing it.

Dundonald laughed, the silent laughter of the mind, edged with sadness. “Cling hard to your purpose, Harlow. Otherwise we too will be Vorn."

The pace quickened. Or perhaps that was only an illusion. They fled at unthinkable speeds, crosscutting time, their bodiless beings making nothing of space and the limitations of matter. They plunged toward a fleck of brightness and it grew, spreading misty spiral arms, and the mists separated into stars, and a galaxy was there all blazing bright and turning like a great wheel. They swept through its billions of suns as a breeze through grains of sand, and the Vorn called, and others answered. There was swift talk back and forth, and Harlow knew that some of the minds broke contact and withdrew again into their privacy, but others did not and now their little company was larger.

They burst free of the spiral nebula. The Vorn scattered away and were gone, to speed the hunt and spread it wider. Harlow, Dundonald and their guide raced on.

There was no time. There was no distance. Like a drunken angel, Harlow plunged and reeled among the island universes, dizzy with the wheeling of stars beyond counting, dazed with the dark immensities between, exalted, humbled, afraid and yet in a very real sense, for the first time, not afraid at all. Several times he strayed, forgetting everything, and Dundonald called him back. And then there was a long last swooping plunge, and a galaxy, and a flickering darkness that was somehow familiar, and Harlow was in a bay on the coast of a great black nebula, and there was a green star burning like a baleful lamp—

Home-star of the Vorn. And from across the universe the Vorn were Gathering.

They danced against the black cloud-cliffs like fireflies on a summer night, and there were very many of them. They coalesced in a bright cloud and went streaming down toward the planet of the green star in a comet-like rush, carrying Harlow with them, and at the last moment he cried out in sudden terror and regret, “No — no—"

But there was a pillar of fire in the night and they streamed toward it, filling the air with their eerie brightness. They brushed the upturned faces of Taggart's men as they passed, and Harlow saw the faces go white and staring with panic.

Then they all vanished in a blur as Harlow spun high, high into the air and flung himself into the shaking glorious pillar. Moth into flame. And his wings were shorn and crumpled and the glory died, and the lightness, and the freedom, as he fell inside that pillar of force. For as he fell, the subtle pattern of its forces was transforming, rearranging, his electrons and atoms back into solidity. He stumbled out of the pillar, and he was a man, he was Mark Harlow again, moving heavily on cement and not knowing why.

He was not alone. Dundonald was beside him — the old fleshly solid Dundonald — and all around them there were others. Tall men whose lean, spare flesh seemed even now to have a certain glow, almost a transparency, as though the long ages in another form had wrought some permanent, subtle change. Their eyes were strange, too — as remote and brilliant as the stars they had followed across the endless void. There was one taller, sterner, more commanding than the rest, and he seemed to be the leader, as perhaps he had been.

"Heavy, slow, mortal,” muttered Dundonald beside him. “Why did we have to come back?"

Dim memory, struggling to return, warned Harlow of danger. He cringed in the expectation of bullets tearing into his now-vulnerable solid body. But there were no shots, and the whole plaza held a confusion of outcries that expressed only fear.

Suddenly he realized that he could not see the plaza. It was obscured in a bright fog, a mad whirling coruscation through which the tall Vorn men moved with calm certainty. Harlow and Dundonald faltered, confused, and then they realized that not all the Vorn had come through the Converter.

By hundreds, by thousands, they had settled upon the plaza in a glowing cloud that blinded and terrified the men who were there on guard, and the others who had run out at the first cry of alarm. They carried weapons, but they could not see to shoot them. Bright mists clotted around them, and the tall quiet men from the Converter moved among them quickly, with a frightening air of efficiency. They had come back a long way to do a certain thing, and they wanted it done and over without delay. The terrified Earthmen were disarmed, swept up, herded together, and held with their own weapons in the hands of the human Vorn.

Dundonald caught Harlow's arm and pointed suddenly. “Taggart!"

He appeared through a thinning of the bright mist, with a heavy rifle in his hands and a cobra look of fury on his face. He leveled the rifle at the dim shadows of the human Vorn in the mist, where they herded the Earthmen. He was bound to hit some of his own men if he fired, but Harlow sensed that he did not care. Harlow shouted a warning and ran forward.

Taggart heard him and wheeled. He smiled. “This was your idea, wasn't it, Harlow? Well—” He brought the rifle to bear.

Harlow launched himself in a low dive for Taggart's knees.

He heard the rifle go off. He felt the impact as he hit Taggart, and a second jarring crash as Taggart fell backward and they both landed on the pavement. But there was no fight. Hands lifted him up, while other hands hoisted Taggart less gently to his feet.

The voice of a Vorn spoke inside his mind. “That was rash and needless. We were ready for him."

Harlow turned and saw the tall leader beside him. He knew the man was speaking to him as he would have spoken before he returned through the Converter, and it dawned on Harlow that none of the re-created Vorn had spoken a word aloud, which was one reason for the weird silence in which all this had been done.

The Vorn leader smiled. “But it was brave, and we thank you. We are glad that we deflected the weapon in time."

Harlow whispered, “So am I!” He wiped his forehead.

The tall men led Taggart away. And the bright mist began to lift as the Vorn withdrew a little.

The strange, silent battle was over. Taggart, Frayne and their crews were captive. Dundonald's and Harlow's crews had been released, and now the tall Vern men relinquished their weapons and their captives to the men of the Star Survey.

Yrra was running out across the plaza, calling his name.

Harlow ran to meet her, catching her in his arms. He kissed her, and overhead the glowing, dancing stars that were the Vorn hung in the deepening twilight of their ancient world, as though they were waiting.

He said to Dundonald, “Your ship can take word to the Survey. We'll need more ships here, more men to guard the Converter permanently—"

The voice of the Vorn leader spoke again in his mind.

"There will be no need. Before we leave, we will make very sure that the Converter is not used again."

Night had fallen and the Vorn were leaving. Eagerly the tall, strange men crowded up the steps of the Converter. Joyously, they stepped into the blazing beam, and light, free, and joyful they sped out of the upper beam as radiant stars to join the hosts of other firefly stars that waited.

Harlow stood with Yrra and Dundonald and watched them. There were tears in Dundonald's eyes, and he took a half-step toward the stairs.

"No,” said Harlow. “No, you can't, you mustn't."

Dundonald looked at him. “You weren't free as long as I was, you don't know. And yet you're right. I can't."

A door in the cement side of the Converter — a hidden door they had not known before existed — opened and out of it came that tall Vorn man who had been their guide. His thought came to them.

"You will be wise to remove yourselves from the Converter, before the last of us depart."

Harlow understood, and a great sadness took him. “The greatest secret of the galaxy — to be destroyed. Yet it's better."

"It will exist again,” came the Vorn's thought.

Startled, Harlow looked at him. “Again? How?"

"You too, you men of Earth, will someday build a Converter. When you first stepped off your planet, you set yourself upon a road that has no turning-back. You will go farther and farther, as we did, until you hunger for the farthest shores of the universe, and those you can only reach as we did."

Harlow wondered. Would it be so? Or would Earthmen take a different road altogether.

Yrra tugged fearfully at his arm and spoke to him, and he looked up to find they were alone. The last of the Vorn was climbing the steps toward the beam.

He awoke to their danger, and turned and took Dundonald's arm. Dundonald seemed amazed with his own thoughts, his face pale and drawn by a wild regret, and Harlow had to drag him back with them across the plaza.

They turned by the ships, and looked back. No human figure now was visible by the Converter. But out of the upper beam sped a last radiant Vorn to join the hosts of others that swirled in the darkness.

A dull red spark appeared in the side of the massive cement pedestal that held the Converter. It was not flame, but a force unleashed by whatever fusing device the Vorn had left. It spread, and devoured, and the supernal beam that had been a gateway to the infinite for thousands of years flickered and dimmed and went out. The hungry redness ate all the Converter, and it too went out, and all was dark. Except—

"Look!” cried Yrra, in awe.

Overhead the Vorn were circling, a radiant will-of-the-wisp host, a maelstrom of misty shooting-stars as though they bade farewell forever to the world of their birth.

And then they shot skyward, joyously, a great plume of rushing little stars outward bound for the farthest shores of creation, for the freedom and wonder of all the universe, time without end.

It was not for Earthmen, Harlow thought. They had their own road, and must follow it. And yet, as he looked up, he felt that his own eyes held tears.