The Well of The Worlds

XIV

Strength poured through him in a golden flood. The Firebird seemed to leap in his hand a little, as if it struggled toward the Well in which its rightful place stood empty, so very near now, waiting for its return. If it went into the Well again the last path to Earth would close forever. And if it did not go in—how long could Sawyer, even with this new strength flooding him, resist the pull of that hypnotic dance?

The choice was not his to make. For as the golden wings spread in his hand, Nethe was loosing her last, her fatal stroke straight into her adversary’s face. The newly slashed hand that held the Goddess’s mask dropped helpless before Nethe’s green-bladed blow, and the Goddess for an instant stood undefended. Nethe’s single-eyed weapon swung its Gorgon glare in a long sweep across the Goddess’s masked face. And the Goddess cried out in a high, thin scream that echoed inside the Goddess-Mask she wore, and reeled—

Reeled forward, toward the Firebird. Her masked eyes burned as she saw it. She stumbled around the edge of the Well, toward Sawyer and the precious thing he held.

Perhaps Nethe felt and saw from the corner of her eyes the sudden spread of sparkling wings above her. Perhaps she only followed the Goddess’s lifted gaze. But she whirled as the Goddess’s weapon lowered. She too saw the Firebird hovering in Sawyer’s hand, no more than head-high above her now…

Did the Firebird’s burning power dispel all lesser powers around it? Or did Nethe’s sweeping gesture as she whirled dissolve the cell that held Sawyer prisoner above the platform? He did not know, but the shining blur of the walls around him vanished and he fell six feet through golden air to land staggering for balance upon that floor of glass above the abyss.

The Firebird was Nethe’s for the taking. How could he resist her now? Dazed by the suddenness of his fall, he could only stumble backward away from her and the Well. Beyond her shoulder he saw the oncoming Goddess, eyes blazing through the jewels of her Goddess-Mask, heard her scream out Nethe’s name—saw her swing her weapon shoulder-high with one last, tremendous effort, steadying her slashed hand as she lifted it…

Nethe seemed to whirl in mid-air to meet that final desperate attack. She swung her own weapon around to face the Goddess’s, holding it before her like a shield. Face to face and eye to eye the two masks fronted each other, the blazing eye-beams the Goddess wielded smashing the full power of their terrible green blades into the one-eyed face of Nethe’s mask.

And Nethe’s mask went dead.

She looked down at it, for an instant ludicrously dismayed, holding the useless shield against her with both hands. Then suddenly she laughed, a wild, despairing shriek of ironic merriment. She flung the blind thing from her and twisted like a striking snake straight toward Sawyer and the Firebird.

The impact of her hurtling weight sent him half-stunned to the glass floor. He felt the Firebird snatched from his fingers and heard in his very ear her wild, triumphant scream of unbearable joy as at last, at long last, she closed her hands upon the talisman that could still mean triumph for her.

The scream hung ringing on the air for a moment, full of sound of victory. Then its timbre changed. For the twin beams of the Goddess’s deadly mask swept the air above Sawyer’s head, and Nethe’s scream changed to a long cry of piercing, inhuman pain…

Looking up from the floor, Sawyer saw her towering for one last instant impossibly tall above him, the shining Firebird held high, and the two pale-green beams of the weapon that killed her transfixing her robed body from side to side. She stood there in the moment of her triumph, pinned through by the two green swords, the Firebird pouring useless power through a body no longer able to contain it.

If the Sselli died slowly, the Isier could die more slowly still. It seemed to Sawyer that she stood there an eternity. He saw the inhuman fury, the inhuman despair of her face. He saw it change to implacable determination. She was dead already, and she knew it, as she writhed snake-like toward the Goddess with resolution clear upon her dazzling face. If she could not uphold her own claim to godhood, then no one should win. No one at all. She would bring her whole race crashing with her if she must fall. In no other way could she prove her godhood, but in this way she could and would…

Sawyer saw the flash of her ice-robes streaming, the gush of her luminous blood, the blinding brilliance of the Firebird open and sparkling in her hands, as she hurled herself upon the Goddess. The great blades of the mask still flared between them, but Nethe was beyond the fear of death now. She flung herself forward against the beams that pierced her, straight upon the tall, dark figure of her slayer.

For an instant Sawyer saw them reeling together, in dazzling silhouette against the bubbling fire of the Well behind them. He saw them sway, heard the two voices mingling in a terrible, bell-clear cry. Then together they reeled backward and fell…

The Well received them both.

And with them, flashing and sparkling, fell the Firebird, open-winged, and the end of the race of gods.

Swaying on his feet, dazed and half-blinded by the dazzle of the Well, Sawyer saw them fall. And as they fell, they changed.

Light like vapor seemed to smoke out around them. The molecules of their bodies seemed to disperse and disarrange until only a dance of swarming molecular mist swirled where the two relentlessly interlocked bodies had vanished. And then the mist began to reassemble…

Long, serpentine limbs dawned in that golden haze, condensed into two writhing bodies with the hideous squat heads of the Sselli, and the great, empty, jewel-clear eyes.

He had known it. He had been certain of it, in that well of the mind below the level of awareness. They were the same, not two races sprung from one stock but the same. The Isier were the Sselli. All the ancient myths of Earth slid dimly through his memory that dealt with the splitting—the fission—of life-forms. Legends of the doppelanger, of possession and exorcism and the divisions between Jekyll and Hyde in all their varied forms.

What unknown link in the bridge between mortal life and atomic energy had the Isier spanned when they first altered themselves into immortal isotopes of their natural form by the lost science of the Well of the Worlds?

No one would ever know, now, but it had been an alteration of deadly danger to themselves, for the instability of the isotope was something which they could not control in this time of crisis. When the Well functioned they had been safe enough, but it was very clear now what peril overtook them when the Well ceased to flow with the energy they required to keep them stable in Isier-form. Energy failed and their bodies flickered down the scale to the next isotopic shape, which was the Sselli…

And the end was not yet. The full circle of the change had not yet closed.

The falling, changing bodies dropped out of sight down the dimension-piercing Well whose other end linked to Earth. There was silence for an instant, while the ring of nuclear patterns tumbled on in its serene, endless dance.

Far off, as it were happening in another world, the battle between Sselli and Isier still raged, a suicidal struggle of a single race pitted against itself by that strange, uncontrollable hatred of like for like. Locked in the relentless embrace of mutual destruction, they still pitched screaming over the rim of the symbolic world toward nothingness, screaming as angels might have screamed who fell over heaven’s walls in the War of the Seraphs.

Then, far down in the Well as Sawyer stared after the vanished Goddesses, wings began to flicker, lights began to rise.

Sawyer flung himself flat upon the glass floor, hugged it, strove to be unreal, not there, dead and vanished. For he knew that flicker. He had seen it before, in the Fortuna mine out of which in some incredible way it was now rising, and there was no power in creation that could control it now, with Nethe gone and the summoning symbol with her.

Now the Well was open and uncontrolled, drawing upon the full destruction latent in Earth’s poles, and through it, upon other dimensions and other spaces no human mind could grasp.

Up out of the Well a geyser of fountaining violence came pouring. And the geyser was full of the flicker of V-shaped wings and the high, ringing song of the Firebirds, as the whole exploding force of the magnetic fields beyond the Well burst upward into Khom’ad.

In midair the fountain flattened and came showering and soaring down. The living Firebirds swooped in a terrible, scattering swarm over the battle, darting with wings nearly furled, like javelins of fire. Compulsion drove them as strong as the terrible revulsion which locked Isier and Sselli, two by two, in murderous battle whenever they came within arms’ reach of one another.

The divided race was recombining, but in a new and violently destructive form. For the Isier isotope had gone through not two, but three alterations before it closed its circle. The Firebirds were the third.

They swooped above the battle, and soared and struck. Wherever they touched the struggling figures below, a fusion took place which the mind could not conceive. Sawyer, hugging the glassy floor, knew he was going mad. No one could watch this happen and not go mad to think of it.

For when the three separate stages of this single basic race fused, there the exploding violence that was geysering up the Well burst out in irresistible fury. Until now, the Isier had been following a circle of change. When energy failed them and they dispersed upon the air in a cloud of molecular mist, they had reassembled through some other-dimensional door upon the world of the Under-shell, where the Sselli form took shape out of that mist.

But that was not the end. Energy had been lost, and it must somehow be regained. So the Sselli, in their turn, changed too. Again the other-dimensional door opened—but not in this world. It opened upon Earth. It opened at the Pole to which Khom’ad had been indissolubly fixed through the axis of the Well. And avidly into Fortuna poured the glittering Firebirds, which were the third and last unstable isotope of the Isier race. The richly complex uranium with all its potent energy locked inside those heavy structures of electrons had fed the Firebirds until they absorbed enough to whirl them helpless and unremembering back around the cycle into the ice-hall and Khom’ad again. Only Nethe had known what was happening, and all she could do was desperately try to keep the cycle turning without interruption until she could become Goddess and restore the Firebird.

There had always been a safety fuse for the Isier. Originally it had been the Firebird itself, which became non-conductive whenever the other end of the Well touched too powerful an energy-source in the universes beyond Khom’ad. But after the Firebird’s theft, the Well no longer poured out the energy the Isier needed, and as they changed into the new and dangerously unstable isotopic form, another, stranger safety-factor came into play, dependent on the low binding forces that hold the heavier elements together. As the atoms of unstable elements may go through a cyclic change—so the matter, the wave-lengths, the form that made up the Isier had been able to pass through a cycle of transmutation.

And it was a safe enough cycle, so long as the three forms did not meet. All the legends that deal with fission between life-forms have the same infallible end. When the divided selves meet, they destroy themselves.

For now the Firebird, the perfect energy-conductor, had charged the inert channel of the Well. It sucked up the energy-forms of the Firebirds from the uranium mine on Earth and drew them inexorably back to Khom’ad to complete the fatal isotopic interlocking.

This time it was not a circle but a spiral they followed, the same suicidal spiral that begins with uranium 238 and whirls so swiftly through the instability of neptunium to plutonium and back to uranium again, but 235 this time, and—fissionable. In critical mass—it explodes.

Within the Well there sprang into visibility the whirling glimpse of a planet, falling, spinning, diminishing as the bond between Earth and Khom’ad snapped and the two worlds swept apart in space, and then irrevocably were parted by the wall between two kinds of space, two dimensions that could never touch except through the adaptive link of the Well itself.

The Well opened into a blackness beyond space and time.

But up from it still poured the fountain of the Firebirds, bringing the last necessary factor into the equation. The cyclotron of the planet shuddered under the impact of this titanic energy, and—

The new isotope formed. The utterly new element that was Isier, Sselli, and Firebird combined into critical mass.

One instant Sawyer saw them stand fused and locked into three inter-dissolving figures wherever the merging struck them, three and yet impossibly one. Serpentine savage and shining demigod a monad together, with winged fire lifting from the shoulders of each unbelievable golden figure, they stood frozen.

This was Satan before the Fall, Sawyer thought insanely, his face pressed to the transparent floor that did not stop his seeing. Tremendous shining figures, part serpent, part angel, winged with fire that made the very mind go blind with its brilliance.

One instant they stood godlike in space, locked in a frozen moment of conflict. Then the geyser of exploding violence burst outward, like the cloud that stood first over Almagordo. Terribly it hung above the hollow world of Khom’ad—hung and spread.

It spread through directions the mind could not follow, nor the eye. The Firebird that could irresistibly conduct all energies drank now the energies of the Isiers’ death. The demigods who, in making themselves immortal, had extended into—into elsewhere, now saw the cloud of their destruction burst elsewhere and roll in great, blinding billows of violence elsewhere, while the flesh of the gods went up together in the fires of heaven.

Only the echoes of gigantic thunder rolled through the vast and empty sanctum as rifted space healed itself after the passing of the gods. And the axis upon which all their power had turned was the Well of the Worlds no longer.

Dead, empty, burned-out blankness, the Well lay charred upon the glassy floor. Sawyer’s dazzled eyes still held the after-image of its final blaze as it died, and that glitter upon his eyelids was the last thing he saw as all memory failed him.

Thunder in his head shocked him to life. He stood on glass, above golden emptiness. He had been standing here a long time, facing a Mask.

He could not remember clearly.

But a masked figure was coming toward him slowly through the breach in the glass wall where a thousand years ago, it seemed to him, he had watched the Sselli pouring. He knew now why he stood motionless, and what he awaited.

From beyond the broken wall a murmur and a rising chorus of men’s voices was beginning to echo higher and higher in a crescendo of triumph. He heard bells far off begin to swing, not in alarm now but in paeans of thanksgiving.

Only here inside the sanctum of the vanished gods was it not yet time for triumph. Peace had not yet come here. Everywhere else upon the hollow world it dwelt, but a masked man walked slowly toward Sawyer, and with him came death.

But he came unsteadily, upon failing legs. For the last energy of the Firebird was beginning to flicker out in Alper’s ponderous body.

Ten feet away he paused, braced himself. It was strange, Sawyer thought, to be looking at an Isier mask out of whose eyes no streams of killing violence poured. Alper’s small grey eyes gazed dully instead from the empty sockets of the Isier-face; he must have picked it up from the battlefield of Armageddon, as he came—

“It’s gone,” he said, “You let the Firebird go!”

“Earth’s gone too,” Sawyer heard his own voice answer. He drew a deep, dazed breath. “There’s no way back. Killing me won’t help. We can live—I suppose—in Khom’ad—”

“Alper!” a voice called. “Alper, wait!” Zatri’s portly, masked figure was scrambling through the avalanche of shattered glass toward them, the echoes of his voice rolling under the great vault. Zatri too still wore his mask. What had been happening outside while the Armageddon of the Isier went on Sawyer did not even wonder. If Alper and the Khom had worked together during the crisis in masked communication, it made no difference now. There was still one last battle to be fought, and no one could help Sawyer but himself.

“Live here?” Alper said bitterly. “Without the Firebird? How long would I last? You’ve got time! You’ll find some damned plodding job and work at it all your life. You’ll marry. You’ll raise a family. But what about me? How can I rule—”

“You can’t,” Sawyer said calmly. “You’re through ruling. There are jobs here you could do well, but ruling isn’t one of them.”

“Alper!” Zatri shouted. “Wait!”

“Wait?” Alper snarled in his mask. “What for? So you can noose me again? Oh no!” He sprang toward Sawyer, his clenched fists lifting. “You threw away the Firebird! Without it I’ll die. I’ll die!” The smiling mask roared suddenly, “But you’ll die first!”

The fists unfolded. The right hand dropped toward that pocket where the transceiver control lay.

Knowing he was too late, still Sawyer leaped.

The turbulent lightnings crashed through his brain, mounted to a deadly crescendo. Now it was his own skull that was the chamber of a cyclotron, driving violence faster and faster, louder and louder as he stumbled blindly toward the serenely smiling mask…

His hands flew up to hold his skull together, and he knew dimly that he too wore a mask. He had wholly forgotten that. It had not even seemed strange to him that he understood Zatri’s words. Zatri—

Dimly he saw Zatri doing something very strange. Zatri too was clasping his temples with both hands, and in the moment Sawyer’s gaze touched him the old man tore off his mask and sent it clashing and rolling across the glass floor. His face was convulsed with surprise and pain as he stared from Sawyer to Alper.

All of it happened between two halves of the same second, while Sawyer leaped toward the man who was doing his best to split his skull in two. In the middle of the leap, in the middle of the second, as he saw Zatri’s uncovered face, Sawyer quite suddenly realized the truth. He laughed with a choke of triumph, and in mid-air ripped off the mask he wore—

Then he struck Alper and the old man went down, hand still pressing the control. But this time Sawyer wanted it pressed. For he knew why Zatri had torn off the mask, and he knew what was happening in Alper’s own skull.

Alper made one useless guesture toward his own mask in the instant before Sawyer struck him. For he too had realized in the same instant, what was wrong.

The masks were transceivers too, in their own strange way. They were transmitters of sound and energy-waves, creating their own carrier-beams. And they were tremendously powerful amplifiers. Sight and sound perceived through them were the sights and sounds a god might know, vivider than human senses ever receive. And the ultra-sonic vibrations that roared now through Sawyer’s skull were roaring many times magnified through Alper’s—while he wore his mask!

Sawyer’s impact rolled the old man over on the floor, and Sawyer with one hand pressed the back of Alper’s head hard to hold his masked face down upon the glass, fixing the mask in place. With the other hand he groped for Alper’s on the transceiver control, found it, closed hard…

Alper screamed.

Under Sawyer’s grip his fingers fumbled wildly at the control. Thunder beat blindingly in both heads alike, deafening Sawyer, dazing him, but roaring with killing force through Alper’s head behind the mask. Alper must be hearing ten times the fury of lightning and thunder that pounded through Sawyer’s skull.

Now Alper’s only thought was to release the pressure upon the control, to stop that thunder in Sawyer’s head and the infinitely worse vibrations of his own. But Sawyer’s grip would not let go. Stunned and dizzy, he crushed the old man’s hand still harder upon the controls. There was one hope for him now and only one. If Alper could find the hidden release which Sawyer could not find, and spring it before this thunder killed them both…

If Alper died before he found it, Sawyer was doomed too. For while the transceiver linked them, Alper’s death meant Sawyer’s.

Desperately the old man’s fingers fumbled at the control. Sawyer dared not let go fully, but he released the pressure a little—just a little—and the fingers under his twisted purposefully at the disc they clasped…

Then, without any warning at all, it was over.

Dazed by the suddenness of his release, by the echoing silences in his own brain, Sawyer crouched over the old man’s body and heard something tinkle on the glass beside him without at first realizing what it was. His dulled eyes saw it roll—a little disc tiny as an aspirin tablet, shining metal, curved inward on the underside—

The transceiver.

Hardly daring to believe it, he released Alper with one hand and pressed his palm to his head. It was gone. He was free.

Very slowly, as Sawyer’s hands released him, Alper rolled sidewise on the floor, straightened and was still. The heavy head rolled back until the Isier mask stared up at Sawyer with its eternal, serene smile. The grey eyes behind it were no less empty than the mask, staring up into Sawyer’s face and seeing nothing at all. Age had been Alper’s terror—and he would never be older now.

After what seemed a long, long time, Sawyer lifted his gaze from the dead man’s.

Zatri was coming toward him across the glass floor. Beyond him, by the broken wall, Klai stood watching. She lifted an unsteady hand when her eyes met Sawyer’s, and he smiled without moving. He could not move. He was too tired.

But it was all over now. He glanced sidewise once, for the last time, at the ruined Well that was nothing but fused metal now. Beyond it, beyond dimensions of space and time, his own lost world spun eternally severed from Khom’ad. That was irrevocable. He had done the best he could. He had done his job.

An infinity away through the vastness of other-space, someone in an office in Toronto would write “Closed” across a folder and file it in a steel cabinet. Sawyer shook his head hard. Now there was only Khom’ad. There could be a good life on Khom’ad too—but that was up to him.

He turned toward Klai, waiting in the portal. Moving heavily, he got to his feet.

A man can find a job in any world. He knew he would not forget Earth. Wryly he thought that when he drank too much he would talk of it. If there was liquor on Khom’ad, he would certainly drink too much, at first—and babble, he told himself—of green fields. There would be at least one time more when Earth came back to his thoughts and his speech more vividly than when he had dwelt on Earth—the last time a man ever speaks of anything at all.

But he was young, now. He had a long life ahead of him. It could be good, if he made it good.

The serenely smiling mask on Alper’s face watched him walking steadily over the swimming golden void toward Zatri, and toward Klai.