The Well of The Worlds

XII

There was a moment of total disorientation. the cell walls seemed to fold inward upon themselves in a complex, precise motion like a well-organized machine. As he struck the floor inside the cell he saw Klai swept helplessly outward by the same action that had carried him in. The cell was a relentless trap. As he struggled to his feet on the hexagonal flooring, thrusting hard against the wall in a vain attempt to turn it again, he saw Zatri’s masked face pressed close to the crawl of the spectrum in the glass, heard the old man’s voice speaking softly and clearly.

“I’m sorry, young man,” Zatri said. “I came here to take that place myself. But I think this is a better way than if I were there, because with you inside, it need not be a way that ends in death. For you, there’s a chance. For anyone else—” He made a gesture of finality.

Klai had fallen to her knees on the ramp beside Zatri. Gently he went to lift her. Sawyer watched them through a crawl of colors so hypnotic he could not focus on them without feeling sleep cloud his brain. He rapped on the glass.

“Quick!” he said. “I—I’m dizzy. If you have anything to say, say it! Or is this outright murder?”

“Shut your eyes!” Zatri said. “Don’t look at the colors while I talk. No, it isn’t murder—or if it is, we all die anyhow, and you’ll have had your chance to save yourself and the rest of us with you. Maybe the whole race. I’m not forcing you into anything I wouldn’t do myself, if I could. But only you wear the—the amulet, the transceiver. So that only you can resist the hypnosis, when the crisis of the ceremony comes. Only you.” He glanced at Alper, watching all this with impatient eyes. He twitched the cord ever so slightly.

“As he holds your life, I hold his,” he said. “And I value no life, not even my own, above the goal I’m seeking. If Alper would release you and put the device on me, I’d change places with you. But he wouldn’t. So you must go into the ceremony as a sacrifice—but not unarmed. You have the transceiver. You carry the Firebird. You have a chance no other man could hope for.

“This is my goal. To break the Isier rule and free my people. I know it isn’t yours, but I can’t spare myself or you. I must do what I can to achieve that purpose. Now listen, because there isn’t much time. At any moment you may be swept into the ceremony.”

Sawyer, listening tensely, his eyes closed, heard Mai begin to murmur something in a voice of drowsy alarm and opened his eyes long enough to see, through the crawl of colors, the girl lifting her head and staring around dazedly. Zatri hushed her with a gentle shake of the shoulder.

“You’ll go into the ceremony,” he went on. “But not helpless. Not hypnotized into blind obedience. Because when you feel yourself slipping, you must call on Alper to touch the control of the transceiver, gently, very gently, I’ll make sure of that. He explained enough of it so that I feel sure the lightest shaking of sound in your head will be enough to break the hypnosis.

“What happens in the ceremony no one knows exactly. But it is known that the victims must be hypnotized before the Firebirds can feed. Before your time comes, my Khom may be able to save you. I told you we have explosives. I hope to destroy enough of the Temple to let the Sselli in. That’s our plan. If it works in time, you’ll be safe.

“The Temple towers will be a blaze of light before tonight’s ceremony ends, and the Sselli will be flocking around the walls, battering to get in. If we’re lucky we’ll breach the walls of the Hall of the Worlds itself, and turn the Sselli in upon the Isier.

“Then there’ll be fighting!” The old man’s eyes glowed behind the mask. “Then the Isier will have to unleash their last weapons. It’s our hope the Sselli will succeed in turning them against the Isier. But if the Sselli fail, there’s one chance left. It all depends on you.” He hesitated.

“Do you hear me?” he asked. “Open your eyes for a moment. I want to be sure. Yes, yes. Then listen—if you see the Isier winning, judge your time. When it seems right to you—somehow you must reach the Well. Somehow you must drop the Firebird down—and drop it open .”

Sawyer for the first time was moved to speech.

“But—Alper said—”

“Alper was right. It means danger. But the immortality of the Isier depends on the Well. We can’t kill them. But—I think we can kill the Well itself. True, that may also wipe out the whole city. It may send the Upper Shell crashing through to the Under-Shell. But—” Zatri chuckled grimly. “If the Isier win, you die! Would you rather die a victim, or a conqueror? Alone, or with a race of gods to go with you? And knowing that what men remain alive afterward will owe their freedom and their future to what you did?”

Zatri was silent after that, breathing rather hard through his mask. Presently he said, “There isn’t much time. You’d better tell Alper as much as you think suitable. It might be better not to mention the final plan, if everything else fails—about the Firebird, I mean. If he realizes it’s lost to him, he may not cooperate.” He coughed gently.

“Look at me, young man,” he said. “Just for a second. I don’t ask your forgiveness, but I want to say again I’m doing this because I must. If you die, we all die. If you win, we win with you. I wish I could do the job myself. Do you believe me?”

Sawyer met his eyes through the coiling spectra in the glass.

“I believe you. I don’t mention forgiveness. If I come out of this alive, you’ll answer for what you’ve done. But I believe you.” He turned his head. “Alper, I—” He stared. “Alper! Zatri, wake him up!”

The big old man was lolling half helpless against the glass at Zatri’s side, peering through the cell walls with their irresistible hypnosis of motion and color. Zatri jumped to shake him awake. Klai watched them with drowsy wonder. Sawyer kept calling, over and over, as loudly as he dared, “Alper! Alper, do you hear me! Alper, wake up!”

“I’m awake,” the big man snarled abruptly fighting Zatri off. “I’m all right. But—Sawyer! Have you looked! Do you realize what they’ve got in there?”

Sawyer had not looked. After his first glimpse of infinite, whirling space beyond the wall of cells, and the lashing, twining coils of fire that spun in it, he had had no attention to spare.

“You’ve got to listen,” he said. “If you want the Firebird, you’ve got to. Alper, do you hear me?”

“Yes, yes,” Alper said, his attention only half fixed. “What’s the matter?”

Sawyer told him, speaking fast and glossing over the question of the Firebird as well as he could. But Alper was muttering to himself.

“The heart of the atom,” he was saying. “The atomic dance! Electrons in—yes, seven shells! And the—the fire circles inside the chamber they’re weaving. Sawyer, do you realize what they’ve got in there? I half guessed it before, but it took this to make me realize—”

Sawyer blinked and looked at Alper through an incomprehensible blurring haze he could not understand. What was wrong? His own eyes? The cell walls had begun to shimmer a little. Alper’s voice came through it shaken too, as if both sound and light waves vibrated in tune with the shaking walls.

“It’s a cyclotron!” Alper said. “A cosmotron, a synchrotron, whatever you like. Something inside there is serving as an oscillator to drive forces around and around the chamber the electrons make. A planetary cyclotron! Somewhere there must be a focusing aperture to release the pencil of high-energy rays, because—you see the green beams? Sawyer, do you see?”

The voice blurred, the face with it, Zatri’s anxious eyes peering through the smiling Isier mask, Klai’s slowly wakening figure behind them. Pure vibration made every molecule of his body shiver in unison with the shivering walls. The colors were moving inward from the walls toward the center of his brain, and with the last despairing flicker of awareness he called to Alper for help…

The smallest of sounds whispered delicately through the chambers of Sawyer’s brain. The whisper grew louder. The blood-beat began to roar like a far-away lion…

Sawyer struggled up to the surface of consciousness and called into the golden blur that hemmed him in, “That’s enough. Alper, that’s enough!” Miraculously, at that, the roar began swiftly to fade until it was only a whisper again of breath rustling through chambers of bone and blood beating deep and full in the arteries that keep the mind alive.

The cell walls no longer surrounded him. He was closed inside a shell of light and he knew the shell was the turning walls of the hexagon, though he himself felt no sensation of turning. He was the hub. The walls pivoted upon him. And the blur of their turning was a thousand times more hypnotic than the blur of colors had been. His mind tugged eagerly to spin with them, into the blurring of oblivion. Only that quiver of constant sound kept him in control.

He remembered what Alper had been saying when the cell walls shut out the sight of him. Atoms. The atomic dance, and the whirl of the cyclotron. The cell walls were an electronic shell closing him in, he thought, and he was the nucleus they turned around. He was growing light-headed with motion…

Far away, hanging head downward in a golden sky, a crescent of Isier were sitting on thrones of gold, upside down in the firmament. But Isier reduced to the size of dolls. Vertigo seized Sawyer violently as sight came slowly back to him. The crescent that floated in space expanded and whirled before him until its ends joined in a circle, but a circle so vast his mind could not accept it. This was what he had glimpsed through the cell-wall in the great, whirling void beyond. He tried in vain to coerce his mind back to reason. He could only stare.

The ranks of solemn angels were ranged in one tremendous circle, facing inward, supported upon nothing at all. They floated free in swimming golden space, and—no, was that a reflection glimmering here and there around their feet? Was it a flat platform under the thrones, invisible, made of clear glass?

Not all the thrones had angels in them. There were broad gaps, one Isier surrounded by vacant seats, then a group of three or four with emptiness on both sides. Where were the rest? Fighting in the streets? Not all. Not even a majority. Perhaps a third of the circle of thrones were occupied. Then the remainder must be those who had gone into vapor when their energy lapsed, and dispersed them upon that strange cycle which they had to take at a word of command none could understand or deny.

In the center of the ring was a sphere of something so bright Sawyer could not look at it. Two tall figures faced each other across the brightness, and a dazzle of green lightnings flashed between them. But he was moving too fast. He could not focus on this or anything—yet. For he was swinging in a wide, bewildering orbit. Far under him now he could see the glass-crowned heads with their blank, serene, backward-staring masks and their vividly alive, forward-staring faces. Watching the future and the past, he thought.

Now his great orbit swung him past them and down, down, down beyond the level of the thrones, far under, toward a vast bowl of golden haze which seemed to form the undersky of the tremendous hollow sphere he whirled in. Looking up, he could see the golden thrones from below, set solid on square bases, and countless Isier feet planted in pairs, flat upon nothingness.

He swung up again on the far side. The level platform with the thrones was a lenticular nebula which he saw edgewise and then slowly dawning into an elipse ringed all around with double-faced heads, and then broadening into a flat circle again straight down. But he could not look straight down, because of that intolerable glare in the center.

Out of it streamed those lashing coils of fire which he had dimly glimpsed from beyond the cell-wall. They flowed writhing and circling through the void in which he spun, circumscribed by it in a way he had not yet begun to grasp, so that the space inside the globe was filled by their tremendous spiraling.

He was not alone in his flight through golden space and golden spears of light. Other blurs of brilliance swung in other orbits around the galaxy of the gods. Other kneeling, human figures, motionless inside the spinning shells that carried them upon their orbits around that fiery sun. He could not count them, there were so many. But he remembered what Alper had said, and by craning and shielding his eyes he made out the number of the orbits. Seven. Seven orbits in which countless electrons spun around a nucleus too bright to see.

And it was growing brighter. As he squinted at it through almost closed lids, a kneeling figure enclosed in its spinning shell of force dropped toward the center of the glare, hovered for a second, dark against that light, and then vanished straight into the heart of the fire, between the two Isier who stood facing each other across it. Instantly the fire flared high, in a burst that scorched the eyes.

And between the two figures green lightnings crackled anew.

Sawyer tried hard to make his thoughts fall into a pattern he could grasp. Too much was happening. He could see too much, and none of it understandable. The blur of the spinning walls that carried him on his orbit was still hypnotic, though that steadying noise in his skull helped hold the sleep at bay.

“Give me a little more, Alper,” he said, and his voice rebounded fantastically from the whirl of the walls. He thought of the disc in Alper’s hand, and his own words whispering out of it, and the image was more disorienting than what he saw around him. “A little, not much. There—there! Good.”

The noise was louder. He could think a little better. But what was happening was still so incoherent he groped frantically for analogies to give it pattern.

“I’m the axis the cell turns on,” he thought. “I’m the proton that swings the electron of the walls around. But in this vaster space, I’m an electron whirling around the nucleus of the fire down there. Who knows what an electron’s made of, anyhow? Nobody.” An instantaneous vision of all electrons in the make-up of all matter swam before his eyes, every one of them a miniature Sawyer kneeling in a spinning hexagon. He shook the picture out of his mind with a tremendous effort.

What was the blinding sphere of light that controlled all these whirling things? The nucleus of this atom with seven shells of force? (A uranium atom? he wondered dimly. Rich and complex with its great cloud of whirling electrons in seven shells around a tight-packed nucleus?) Uranium was the element the Firebirds sucked out of Earth’s pole. Then might that sphere of brilliance be—

“The Well!” he thought. “The Well of the Worlds!” And he strained his dazzled eyes toward it, trying hard to make out what the thing was, his mind trying in vain to pierce its brilliance and see the far end where the world of Khom’ad lay locked to the world of Earth…

He could not. But he could see more clearly, as his vision adjusted to its limit of tolerance, the two figures facing each other across that blinding blaze. A white-robed figure, and a column of swaying, lashing darkness upon which a pale mask floated.

The Goddess. Nethe and the Goddess.

Then this was the Unsealing, from which one or the other would walk alive, leaving a vanquished rival dead beside the Well. How, he wondered in awed amazement, could the Isier die? In what unimaginable form would death overtake the undying gods?

The rings of electrons spun. The fiery streamers of light poured swirling inside the shell of the electrons. And between the two rival Goddesses the sphere of the Well burned high and then low again, as one victim after another whirled downward toward the flame, hovered, dropped. With each victim, the fire flared high.

“And they’re being replaced from outside,” Sawyer thought. “As each drops from the middle ring into the fire, a readjustment must take place all through the seven orbits. Cell by cell they snatch us from the wall of sacrifices and whirl us into the dance as they need us. We—”

A sudden jolt knocked the thoughts out of his head. He was dropping nearer the fire… The outermost orbit of the seven acquired a new electron and the sixth received Sawyer. Presently, he thought, the fifth would rob the sixth of him, and so, step by step, he would fall through the dance of the rings until he hovered above the innermost flame, and dropped…

To replenish the weapons with which the Goddess and the Goddess-elect were lashing each other with whips of emerald flame. What were the weapons? How did they draw upon the burning Well for their power?

As if in answer, for a moment the fire died between them and he could look down clearly and see. For one of the falling electrons was hesitating above the Well. Had some helpless sacrifice, for an instant, jolted half-awake as he dropped toward immolation?

The green fires faded, ceased. The Well filmed over for an instant and it was possible for Sawyer to gaze unblinded upon the heart of the ceremony. He could still not bear to look upon the complex pattern that seethed in the Well. But he could see the two Isier, pausing as if for a moment’s breath before the combat began again.

Nethe’s great, baleful, half-lidded eyes like a snake’s eyes—or like a Sselli’s—glowed with an inner flame as hot as the Well’s. Her face was wet with a luminous dew of sweat, and her robes showed great rents whose edges glowed as if fire had ripped them and ignited an undying line of pale-green ember wherever it touched. She was swaying to and fro as a snake sways, restlessly and endlessly, incapable of standing still because the forces of destruction burned so high in her even while she snatched this moment’s rest.

With the same fierce, snake-like motion the Goddess swayed. Her robes of blackness the color of oblivion were rent too, and glowing with pale-green embers along every slash.

Something was wrong about their heads. And he could not quite make out the strangely shaped weapons they held shoulder-high between their hands as they faced each other.

Then with a shock he realized what had happened. They had removed their masks. Below the fiercely glaring faces they turned to one another, the masks glared as fiercely. With hands spread upon the cheeks of the masks so that the pale smiles, the empty eyes fronted their replicas across the Well like faces in a mirror, the two Isier swayed and panted, waiting…

The hesitating sacrifice dropped into the Well, and the waiting ended.