The Sun Smasher

CHAPTER IX

Out here in the void, out here in the abyss so vast that it made a million, million suns mere fretted starfires on the blackness, infinitely tiny bits of metal raced at incredible velocities, their space-tracks marked with minute flickerings as their field-drives discharged energy against the very warp of the continuum. Presently the many metal bits that were following would reach the one that fled ahead, and then death would leap and flare in the interstellar gloom, unless—

Banning said, “Tharanya's the only card that will take us through now."

Rolf nodded. “If we can convince them that we have her, Sohmsei, bring her and Jommor."

Banning said, “No, wait.” He told the Arraki, “You and Keesh keep out of this, she's in terror of you and it'll only make things harder. I'll get them."

He went aft, to the corridor where a guard stood in front of a locked door. He motioned the guard to open up. Then, remembering the bitter hatred that had been in Tharanya's eyes, and in Jommor's too, Banning drew the heavy pistol from his belt.

Tharanya came out, with Jommor close behind her. She looked tired, and there were lines of strain around her mouth, but nothing of her pride had left her. She glanced at the weapon in Banning's hand, and then she smiled, very scornfully.

"Oh, yes,” said Banning. “I'm’ careful. I'm very careful. You will both go ahead of me."

"Where?"

"You'll find out, just go along.'

You didn't talk to a sovereign that way. Banning rather enjoyed the astonished anger in her face. He admired the lithe stride of her long legs, the poise of her body, as she and Jommor went ahead of him to the bridge.

Jommor stepped first through the bridge-room door. Tharanya followed him, and on the very threshold she stumbled and fell back coming heavily against Banning.

It was not an accident. Banning realized that a split-second too late, when her hands grabbed his forearms and she cried out, “His pistol, Jommor — take it and use it!"

It happened so quickly that those inside the bridge did not see at once what had occurred — and the Arraki, following Banning's orders, were out of sight. But Jommor's reflexes were set on a hair-trigger. He came whirling back at Banning, his face deadly with a sudden hope.

Banning braced his legs and lifted. He swung his arms up high, carrying Tharanya's light weight with them. He swung her into the air and threw her, literally and bodily at Jommor.

He was gambling that Jommor would not sidestep and let her fall. He was right. Jommor caught her, and then Banning's weapon covered them both unwaveringly.

"That was a good try,” he said. “I admire your courage. But I wouldn't do anything like that again."

They stared at him like two basilisks, bright with hatred, and he couldn't blame them. He wished he could. It would have made things easier.

The scuffle had brought the others around now, and Rolf came storming across the bridge, his face dark with anger.

"So you didn't want to frighten her with Sohmsei?” he said to Banning, who shook his bead.

"It seems I'll have to.” He called the Arraki, and then he said to Tharanya, “They won't harm you unless you force them to.'

Behrent had not left the main screen. But he came to them now. His face was composed but his voice was a little thick as he said, “You'd better work fast. A full wing of battle-cruisers is almost within range of us. Radio room reports a demand to stand by."

A flash passed across Tharanya's face. Banning's resolve hardened. “This is it, Tharanya,” he said. “You're going into our radio room and you're going to order these cruisers to sheer off."

"I am not!"

Banning looked at Jommor. “You'd better persuade her, and fast. It means her life."

Jommor said, “You wouldn't kill her."

"Wouldn't I? Maybe you're right,” said Banning. “But what about the others here?"

"What about me?” said Rolf, between his teeth.

Jommor seemed to waver. Tharanya said, “You will not do it, Jommor.” His face became stony with resistance.

The view-plates behind them suddenly blazed with dazzling explosions of light a raving brilliance that paled the stars. Across the whole wall of the heavens, behind Sunfire, great bursts of light flared and faded.

"They're ranging to bracket us,” Behrent said. “We can fight back — but not for long, at these odds."

Banning said tightly, “Tharanya will stop them. I'll have radio-room get ready for her broadcast. Wait."

He raced off the bridge, into the radio-room. He was back in a moment, and he took Tharanya by the arm.

"Now, Tharanya, you're going to speak to those ships, and tell them that they'll cease firing or you'll perish with us."

Tharanya laughed. She looked almost happy. She said, “You won't perish — not this way. You'll have to surrender."

Banning said, “Jommor, you'd better talk to her, and quickly."

Again the view-plates fit to those awful flares, and this time they were closer, so close that they occluded all that part of the heavens.

Jommor said, “Tharanya—"

She exclaimed, “Don't you see, they know they're beaten, they know they can't force me to do it!"

Behrent had gone to the screens again but he came back now. He said puzzledly, “The cruisers just dropped back! They're still following, but they've fallen back and stopped firing."

"They wouldn't!” Tharanya cried. “You're lying—"

Banning heaved a sigh of relief. “That was too close. Anyway, it worked. They won't shell us, now they know their sovereign's aboard."

"But they don't know it yet, do they?” said Rolf.

Banning nodded. “I had radio-room cut this intercom mike right beside us into our broadcast wave. Every ship would have heard Tharanya's voice — and Jommor's."

Jommor uttered an exclamation in a voice thick with anger. Tharanya's eyes blazed baffled hatred, but she said nothing.

Banning motioned with his weapon. “We'll go back down. I wouldn't try any more clever tricks."

"I'll go with you,” Rolf grunted.

The woman said nothing at all when they locked her in the cabin that had been Landolph's. But, in the next cabin, to which they took him, Jommor spoke up when they were about to leave him.

"We could still make a deal,” he said to Banning.

"Turn Tharanya loose in a life-skiff — and I'll restore your memory.

Banning laughed. He thought he had the measure of the man now.

"No, Jommor."

Jommor said steadily, “Rolf will tell you I've never broken faith."

"I can believe that. But I can also believe that you'd break faith this time — to keep us from getting the Hammer. Wouldn't you?"

Jommor made no answer to that, but the wavering of his gaze was answer enough.

Rolf told him, “You've got some time yet, Jommor. But soon, you'll do what we want. You'll be glad to."

"Will I?"

"Yes. Because of the place we are going to. Cygnus Cluster. We are going to it, and into it."

However little the Cluster might mean to Banning, it was perfectly evident that it meant much to Jommor. His powerful face became a shade paler.

"So that's where the Hammer is?"

"That's where. On a world in the most dangerous Cluster in the galaxy. I don't know what world it's on. And I don't know how to navigate the Cluster safely to get there. I'd run Sunfire to destruction, if I tried it. But someone does know."

Jommor's eyes swung to Banning. “The Valkar knows. Is that it?"

Rolf nodded. “Yes. The Valkar knows. Of course, he doesn't remember now, he'd crash us for sure in there — but when he remembers, we'll be safe enough. You. I. Tharanya."

Jommor said nothing for a moment, and then he whispered a curse so bitter that it shocked Banning. They locked the door.

"Let him sweat,” said Rolf. He looked at Banning. “I think you'd better get some sleep, Kyle. You're likely to need it."

"Sleep?” cried Banning. “You expect me to sleep, with those cruisers hounding us, with the Cluster ahead, with—"

"Nothing's going to happen for a while,” Rolf pointed out brusquely. “Those ships will have checked with Rigel by now, they're certain we have Tharanya and they will merely follow us. And Cygnus Cluster is a long way off yet,” he added meaningly, “And you've an ordeal ahead of you."

Again that icy breath of dread touched Banning. He knew that, deep down, he did not want Jommor to consent, did not want him tampering with the mind of Neil Banning.

"Come on,” said Rolf, steering him toward his cabin. “I'll fix you a drink, to relax your nerves."

He did, and Banning drank it, thinking of other things — of Tharanya, and himself, and a vast threatening entity called the Cygnus Cluster. He sat down on the bunk and talked to Rolf, and almost without knowing it he fell asleep.

He dreamed.

He was two men. He was himself, and he was the Valkar, a shadowy sinister figure with cruel eyes and outlandish dress, who bulked larger and larger until the familiar Banning was dwarfed and dwindled into a thing no bigger than a mouse. And the Valkar-self drove the Banning-self away, crying with tiny cries in a vast enveloping darkness. It was a frightening dream. He was glad when he woke from it.

Sohmsei was beside his bunk waiting, patient as a statue. In answer to Banning's question he said, “You have slept a long time, Lord. Very long. Rolf made it so, with a powder he put in your drink."

Banning said angrily, “So he drugged me, did he? He had no right—"

"It was good, Lord. You needed rest, for there will be no rest now, until all is over and done."

Something in the Arraki's tone made Banning shiver. “Sohmsei,” he asked, “you have gifts that are denied to men. Is one of them a telling of the future?"

Sohmsei shook his head. “No more than you or Rolf, Lord, can I see beyond that wall. But sometimes, through a chink in the stones—” he broke off. “Even as men, we dream. It is probably no more than that."

"No, tell me. Tell me what you saw through the chink in the wall!"

"Lord, I saw the whole broad sky on fire."

Banning got up. “Do you know what it meant?"

"No. But doubtless we shall learn.” Sohmsei crossed to the door, which he opened. “And now The Valkar is wanted on the bridge."

Banning went there, in no joyous frame of mind. Rolf and Behrent were both there, looking haggard, as though they had tried to sleep without the benefit of drugs and found it useless. They were standing at a forward view-plate. They turned their heads when Banning entered, and nodded, and when he joined them, Rolf put one hand on his shoulder and pointed with the other.

Banning looked. Ahead of the ship, already clearly defined and growing imperceptibly larger almost as be watched, was a vast blazing cloud of stars, a stunning and unthinkable splendor of suns, scarlet, gold, and peacock-blue, emerald and diamond-white, flung like the robe of God across infinity. Patches of nebulosity glowed here and there with softer radiance, and all along its side there was a darkness, a black cloud that absorbed all light, a greedy thing that seemed to feed on suns.

"I believe,” said Rolf softly, “that on Earth it is known as the ‘America’ cluster, because of its shape. You see the resemblance to that continent's outline? And how odd the name seems, now."

"I wish I were back there,” muttered Banning, and meant it.

Behrent had not taken his eyes from the glory ahead. To him it was not a wonder and a beauty, but a challenge — one that he knew he could not meet.

"A storm of stars,” he said. “A howling gale of nebulae and rushing suns, and bits of worlds and moons, torn loose and smashed to fragments in the gravity tides. The wildest cluster in the galaxy—” He turned to them and said, “And the Hammer is in there?"

"Yes,” said Rolf. He had iron in his voice now. “It's in there."

To Banning, it made the ancient Valkar weapon of mystery more awesome when he looked upon the terrifying place where it had been prepared and hidden. What could it be, this strangely-named Hammer that the galaxy had whispered of in dread for ninety thousand years?

His mind went back to what Sohmsei had said. “Lord, I saw the whole broad sky on fire,” and such nightmare visionings rose in him that he forced them down with an effort.

"It's in there,” Rolf was saying grimly, “and we're going in after it. The Valkar will take us through."

Banning, feeling weak and hollow, turned to him and said, “I think we'd better have another talk with Jommor.

But even as he walked down the corridor beside Rolf, he knew it was useless. He — Neil Banning, or the Valkar, or both of them together — take a cruiser through that cosmic wilderness of suns? Impossible!

Jommor looked up at them when they entered his prison room. No particle of his hatred and his bitter anger had abated, and yet Banning sensed that something in him had changed. The iron was beginning to bend.

Rolf, without speaking, touched a staid and opened the view-plate in the wall, giving oblique vision of that storm of clustering suns ahead.

"Spare me your subtleties, Rolf,” said Jommor, with an edge of contempt in his voice. “I have seen it."

"I'm not a subtle man,” said Rolf. His face had never been more rock-like and bleak. “I just drive straight ahead and do what I can. You know that. You know when I say we re going into that Cluster, we are. You can take that as a constant, in your equations."

Jommor's eyes brooded on Banning. “If I do the thing, do Tharanya and I get our freedom at once?"

Rolf jeered. “Oh no, not at once. Those damned cruisers are still trailing us, and they'd snap us up. No — not till we're back out of the Cluster."

Jommor said suddenly, still looking at Banning, “He doesn't want it done. He's afraid."

Banning felt swift anger. “I'm not afraid,” he lied. “And I would point out that you've little time, at the rate we're going."

Again, a silence. Jommor finally made a decisive gesture. “I can't let Tharanya go out like this. I'll do it.” He added, and he spoke now to Rolf, “But don't feel too badly if it doesn't turn out quite as you expect."

Rolf's face darkened. “Listen, Jommor, it's known that you can play with men's minds like a child with toys. But don't be clever now! Unless the Valkar's memory comes back perfectly, unless his mind is sound and strong and with no flaw or weakness, you and Tharanya won't live long!"

"I promise,” said Jommor deliberately, “that it shall be as you say. Yet — I know more of the mind than you. And I think you don't know what you are doing."

He stood up, he became suddenly the scientist, calm, precise, assured. He gave directions as to the apparatus he would need, the power flow he would require. Rolf listened, nodded, and went away. Banning remained. His heart had begun to pound. He did not like the veiled threat that had been in Jommor's words. He didn't like it at all.

The machine, when Rolf brought it, looked so simple. Thousands of years of psychological science, of men's lives and dreams and work on far star-worlds, had gone into this thing, and to Banning's ignorance it seemed only to be a cubical cabinet with a face of odd vernier dials, and a thing like a massive, swollen metal helmet. The helmet, Jommor suspended from the ceiling, and then motioned Banning to a chair. He sat down, not speaking, and Jommor lowered the great helmet over his skull.

It occurred to Banning suddenly that he must look very much like a woman in a terrestrial beauty parlor with an oversize hairdryer on her head. He had an hysterical impulse to laugh. And then it hit him.

Just what hit him, he could not be sure. Electronic waves of some sort, he supposed, in octaves still beyond the science of Earth. Whatever it was, it invaded his mind with a silent crash, an — impact that sent his consciousness skidding and reeling over impossible abysses, around non-Euclidean curves. There was no pain. It was worse than pain. It was an agony of speed, distortion, flight, darkness, a whistling whirlpool that was all inside his skull but big enough to suck the universe into it. Round and round, faster, faster, lurching, sliding, caught helpless in the torrent of memory set free, as one by one the barriers were burned away and the neurones gave up their locked knowledge.

Sohmsei's arms were around him, Sohmsei's face bent very large above him. Himself, very small and crying. He had cut his knee.

A woman. Tharanya? No, no, not Tharanya, this woman's hair was golden and her face was gentle. Mother. Long ago—

A broken wrist — but not broken under the apple tree in Greenville, that was one of the false memories that were collapsing and fading away beneath the impact of real remembrance. This broken wrist was in a ship that had just crashed on one of the worlds of Algol.

The ruins. Red Antares in the sky, himself half grown, half naked, racing the Arraki among the broken statues of Katuun, playing with the stars they had let fall.

Nights and days. Cold and beat, eating, sleeping, being sick and getting over it, being praised, being punished, being taught. You are the Valkar, remember that! And you will rule again. Twenty years of — memories. Twenty million details, words, looks, actions, thoughts.

Tharanya.

A girl Tharanya, younger than he, beautiful, sharp-tongued, hateful. Tharanya in the palace garden, not the Winter Palace but the great grim pile inside the capital, tearing the petals off a purple flower and taunting him because he was the Valkar and would never sit upon a throne.

Beautiful Tharanya. Tharanya in his arms, laughing while he teased her lips, not laughing as he taught her, from the wisdom of his male seniority, how a woman can shape a kiss. Tharanya, never guessing how much he hated her, how deep her spoiled-child taunts cut into his sensitive pride. Never guessing how intensely he meant to break her.

Tharanya, believing the words he had spoken and the things he had done, trusting his love — and that had been easy, because who would not love Tharanya and be her willing slave? — letting him into the locked vault where the archives were kept, the lost, forgotten hidden key to the secrets of the Valkars.

Memories, sounds, colors, the feel of silk and woman's flesh, of leather and metal, of pages of imperishable plastic in an ancient, ancient book.

The ruined throne-room, open to the sky. The brooding lake, the stars, the night, and Father. Less of a man than a demigod, remote and very powerful, a beard and a hawk-like eye. Father beside him in the night, pointing to the stars.

Pointing to the Cygnus Cluster, saying, “My son, the Hammer of the Valkars—"

Memories, memories, memories, roaring, thundering, words and knowledge!

Words and actions, facts all neatly strung, and then a clear, clean break. Like the dropping of a curtain in Jommor's laboratory wing on that world of Rigel, one life ended and another began. The Valkar died, and Neil Banning was born.

Now, after ten long years, the Valkar was born again. But Neil Banning did not die, not the ten years when he had been real. Those memories belonged to both of them, share and share alike.

The Valkar-self and the Banning-self cried out together, as one man. “I remember! I remember — oh God, I know now what the Hammer is!"