The Overlords of War

Chapter 14

The space around them was streaked with colored flames. The stars had vanished, and the planet too. The pegasone’s body loomed blood-red. As for the flames, they clashed and intertwined in great sheaves of luminance, but the space they wove back and forth in had no depth. Corson could not have said whether those flames were a few millimeters from his eyes, or light-years distant.

Maybe this was the real appearance of the universe. It was another aspect of it, anyway. The pegasones were moving through time at high velocity, he was sure of that. Which turned perspective topsyturvy. The regular image human beings had of the cosmos was essentially static. For them, stars moved only slowly in the heavens. The release of energy which gave them birth, then consumed them until nothing was left but a few cinders of inert and unbelievably dense matter, was far too slow for a man to perceive under normal circumstances. The greater part of the important events in the history of the universe did not affect him, for he was unaware of them. He could discern only a narrow band of the radiations permeating all of space. He could, live under the illusion that the cosmos is mainly composed of vacuum, of nothingness, that the stars—few and far between—are like a tenuous gas, a trifle more concentrated in the vicinity of a galaxy.

But in reality the universe was full. No point existed in space which did not at some given moment of time correspond to a particle, to a photon, to some manifestation of the primal energies. In a sense, the universe was solid. A supposititious observer looking at it from outside would not have found a way to stick a pin into it. And because the pegasones were moving so rapidly through time, their riders saw the universe as dense. If they reached Ultimate Velocity, Corson said to himself, if they found themselves present at the beginning and the end of the universe and at every instant between, they would purely and simply be squashed.

At the rate they were traveling, light vibrations were invisible. But those blue flames might be electromagnetic waves several light-years long, and those purple rays might correspond to variations in the gravitational field of the stars or of the galaxies themselves. They were literally crossing time at a gallop. And just as a rider on a horse going full tilt does not notice the stones on the roadway, but only the major items alongside it such as hills or trees, only the chief events of the universe were perceptible to them.

Now Corson’s thoughts took a different turn. He had been mistaken in assuming that Veran must have a starship. He and his men must have fled the scene of battle on steeds like this. They had just arrived when he and Antonella fell among them. Aergistal, then, might easily be at the other end of the universe.

The whirling of the flames diminished. They were slowing down. The luminous space around them split up into a horde of separate patches, which shrank as empty blackness gobbled them up, like the progression of a fatal disease. Soon they were surrounded only by bright points. Stars. Among them one alone remained two-dimensional, a disc of gold. A sun. They were spinning around and around. When the heavens ceased to revolve they found themselves once again above the cloud-enshrouded ball of a planet.

Not till then did Corson realize that the second pegasone had vanished. They had escaped their pursuers but they had lost their guide. They were alone above an unknown world, bound to a steed they had no idea how to control.