Howling Stones (34 page)

Though they were being sucked into the very heart of the emerald radiance itself, the light outside actually dimmed slightly. While the composition of the transparent material encasing them did not appear to have changed, the potent efflorescence no longer fully penetrated their sanctuary.

As the ovoid continued to be absorbed into the pulsating mass, their window on the outside world shrank proportionately. Soon only a small circle of visibility remained through the forward tip of their enclosure, and then that, too, was gone.

It was black outside the ovoid. Black, but not threatening in the manner of the darkness Pulickel had experienced previously. Unlike that abomination, the current absence of light did not carry with it the flavor of evil. Within the device, the lambent fog beneath their feet provided enough pink-hued illumination for them to see one another without straining.

There was also the slightest sensation of movement. Fawn found this especially interesting, because if the original pace of absorption had been maintained, they should long since have come out the other side of the main green mass. That they had not yet done so suggested that they had either halted somewhere in its depths or else moved on—somewhere else.

The impression intensified. Nor was it restricted to the two humans, for Ascela and Jorana felt it equally. There was a definite sense of being impelled
forward
, though in what direction no one could say.

Something gave them a sharp jolt, the ovoid rocked, and Pulickel instinctively grabbed for a handhold. There were none available, unless one counted his companions. Sound once more began to reach them, steady and unvarying. Only mildly surprised, he recognized it.

The stones were howling afresh.

Just when he didn’t think he was going to be able to take it any louder, the whine leveled off. Beneath his feet and posterior, the ovoid vibrated like a well-tuned violin string. It was impossible to escape the feeling that they were going
somewhere
.

Ascela confirmed it. “We are set upon a road—though by my grandmother’s tail I cannot say what road that may be, or where it may lead.” She rested back on her haunches in a position that would have painfully cramped any human but that the seni found most relaxing.

Jorana tried to lighten the atmosphere within the ovoid. “I know this road. It is the road to wherever.”

“To wherever the howling stones lead,” Ascela agreed.

With nothing to see, nothing to do, and no control over either, Pulickel saw no reason why he should not emulate the attitude of their nonhuman fellow travelers. Shifting his body, he put his hands behind his head and leaned back against the pale red transparent wall. This was now slightly warm to the touch. Fawn attempted to do likewise, but the length of her limbs made it difficult for her to find a comfortable position. She was expectant, but not particularly happy.

“So you have no idea where this ‘road’ leads?” she queried their companions.

“No,” Jorana confirmed. “But I think we are going to find out.”

“Look here.” Pulickel held out his wrist. “My chronometer’s stopped.”

Fawn glanced down at herself and nodded. “Mine, also.” She checked her other wrist. “Recorder’s not working, either. Readout says the cell is drained, but I put in a fresh one before I joined the rest of you.”

“Mine read half charged before I climbed in here.” Removing the protective backplate, he slipped a fresh cell from his belt into the appropriate receptacle and snapped it shut. The readout did not change. “Dead, also. I have a feeling they’ve all been drained, or discharged, or Tesla knows what else.”

She nodded confirmation after checking her own inventory. “Then we’ll just have to rely on the only recorders left to us.” She pointed two fingers at her eyes.

He nodded. “Let’s hope nothing drains that power source.”

Time passed without measure. They were still discussing the mystery of the depleted power cells when it happened—so suddenly no one had time to react or prepare. Subsequently, they were too overwhelmed to remember the exact moment when everything changed.

Gone was the all-pervasive darkness as the ovoid burst out into a gigantic tunnel composed of brilliant streaks of excited plasma. Yellow, red, and blue flares darkening to deepmost purple twisted and writhed around them, raw energy disciplined and held in check by immense unseen forces. It was an electric pipe, a piece of hollow lightning, down which they were being sucked at inconceivable speed. The ovoid was channeling an aurora.

It wasn’t straight, their chosen course. It bent and looped, and, given the radical twists, they should by rights have been sick all over themselves. But while the
universe outside went mad, something unseen maintained their internal equilibrium. No one upchucked, though Pulickel was about ready to throw out everything he’d ever learned about physics.

And as if the astonishing road down which they were flying wasn’t wonder enough, beyond the flaring walls of the tunnel could be seen dozens, hundreds of others of equally impossible brilliance, coiling about each other like mating pythons or flaring off in a thousand different directions. Awed, they could only stare. Numbed, Pulickel could only wonder how many ovoids like their own were racing along those improbable lengths at impossible velocities to unknown destinations. Fawn speculated aloud on who or what might be riding in them.

Strands of a rope, threads of a weave, the tunnels were not inviolate. Occasionally a burst of sheer radiance would jump from one tunnel to another. The travelers looked in vain for signs of another voyaging ovoid similar to their own but saw none. It left them to wonder if they simply didn’t know how to look, or if they were truly alone, the only ones abroad on the immense network.

Within the speeding ovoid the air stayed pleasant and fresh, the temperature agreeable. Hearts, however, raced.

“I wonder if we’re traveling along some kind of natural structure,” Fawn speculated, “or if someone actually built all this.”

Pulickel stared at the web of plasma tunnels, thoroughly entranced. “If the latter, it would qualify as the most impressive piece of engineering in our part of the galaxy.”

She laughed softly, a sound that always made him think of fired brandy. “What makes you think that we’re still in ‘our part of the galaxy’?”

He smiled back. “Figure of speech. Everyone needs a reference point to start from.”

“Roads.” Jorana was speaking. “There are an infinite number of roads leading to an infinite number of spaces.”

“Yes,” Ascela agreed. “This one chose us. We did not choose it. We are not the masters of the howling stones.”

“Well, somebody must be.” Fawn tried to stretch, had to settle for a half. “Roads have builders. And destinations.”

Pulickel recalled the naked, overpowering, soul-crushing evil he had encountered. Did one of these roads lead to that? Did the one they were on? But if anything, they continued to suffer from a surfeit of light and not its absence.

Fawn was right. They had no idea where they were. Perhaps not even in the same galaxy or, for all he knew, in the same universe. What, after all, did roads of such magnitude and wonder connect? Different dimensions, parallel universes? He would have given a great deal to see just one star—one ordinary, everyday, spherical ball of thermonuclear fire. But there were none; there were only the roads.

The two transportation stones he had taken and inadvertently activated had sent him careening wildly from place to place, with no control over direction or destination. This was different. This was controlled travel down a designated route. To where, neither human nor seni could say. But Fawn was right: a route implied a destination. He wondered what would happen when they reached it.

If
they reached it, he corrected himself. They knew nothing of the lifespan of the beings that had fabricated the network, nor of their tolerance for long-term travel. Perhaps a real-time journey of a century or more was like a week to them. In that event, when it finally slowed to a
halt the ovoid would bring forth a load of desiccated corpses.

He felt of his field pack. They had a few concentrates with them, a little juice and water. It wouldn’t last very long and, consequently, neither would they. If they didn’t stop fairly soon, they would have to try to turn the ovoid around or find another way back.

He smiled sardonically to himself. Might as well try to reverse the spin of a pulsar. Which, though he did not know it, was an evaluation not far off the mark. Senisran, Earth, the whole Commonwealth seemed very far away. In that view he was completely correct.

Eventually the maze of fiery, flaring plasma tunnels began to thin out until less than a hundred remained, twisting and coiling like emancipated Aztec deities in the vastness of empty space. As the ovoid sped on, showing no signs of slowing, this number was reduced until only a handful remained, then less than a dozen. Finally there was only the one, a cascade of explosive red and lambent purple, coruscating yellow and throbbing blue. Their tunnel. Their road.

The notion of comparative velocity had long since lost any relevance. With nothing to measure themselves against, they had no way of estimating their speed. Faster than fast was the best description Fawn could come up with. No one was foolish enough to propose an actual number.

Without warning, the plasma tunnel began to constrict around them, until it was no wider than the ovoid itself. This must be how a corpuscle in a capillary feels, Pulickel imagined. And then, as the tunnel walls drew tight, so at last did the cosmos.

They were surrounded by stars. Ordinary, normal-looking, unremarkable stars. Sol-types and red giants, white dwarfs and binaries, they were clearly visible
through the blazing walls of the tunnel. They swam in a sea of coruscating nebulae, and Pulickel wanted to reach out and kiss each and every one of them. Instant conflagration aside, it would have taken him quite a while.

More stars were visible than any of them had ever seen at any one time in a crystal-clear night sky or from an orbiting platform. So many stars that they crowded the nebulae for living space and threatened to eliminate the blackness of space in which they swam. Enough stars to make the middle of the Milky Way look empty and unpopulated. You could skip from star to star, hop from system to system, Fawn thought. Or such was the impression the sight created.

A new sensation rippled through them: one of progressive deceleration. Curving to their right, the attenuated plasma tunnel carried them toward a yellow sun surrounded by a ring of matter and energy that coexisted in a state foreign to either xenologist’s experience. Out past this striking system they flew, curving sharply above another star that boasted an entourage of no less than twenty planets plus assorted moons and comets and asteroids. Half these worlds were linked by lesser versions of the energy tunnel through which they were traveling.

Still another system, arrayed around a black hole orbited by strange fan-shape objects whose mouths pointed toward the gravitational monster in their midst, drawing upon its energy, sucking up collapsed matter and feeding it to a world the size of Jupiter. There it was molded and shaped, energy bending energy into a bridge that spanned a galaxy. This galaxy.

Pulickel and Fawn had already decided that they had abandoned one in favor of another, but they didn’t know the half of it.

Proceeding down the tunnel at speeds that had dwindled from the impossible to the merely incredible, they passed
structures so immense and overawing as to leave them bereft of superlatives. How could they be expected to relate to an entirely artificial world built, as it were, from matter up?

There was one individual fabrication so grandiose in the conception, so breathtaking in its execution, that it was difficult to believe in its existence. As the tunnel passed through a portal the size of Io, they found themselves confronted by a star that had been entirely englobed by an artificial structure. On its inner surface lived unknown beings in their quadrillions, warmed and nurtured by their captive star. The ovoid passed quickly through its orbit and out an opening on the far side of the englobement.

New tunnels hove into view, passing close to a pulsar to boost their cargoes between the multitudinous stars at ever more incredible velocities. Here were suns enough, planets enough, for individuals who might desire it to have a whole world unto themselves. Desire company, and the plasma tunnels could bring it to you in less than a day.

Above one world someone or something was tracing abstract designs in the planet’s upper atmosphere, using its ionosphere for a canvas. Elsewhere stellar winds were focused through hollow moons, resulting in true music of the spheres. It was a universe of wonders and enchantments.

It was also very far from home.

Once, a ship passed close. Or was it a planet, fitted out with engines and powered out of orbit, vacationing from one sun to the next? Pulickel couldn’t be sure and size gave no clue. The scale of values and comparisons on which he relied for such things had long since crumbled to dust.

A smaller speeding artifact came near enough for astonished faces to be seen staring back at the occupants of the ovoid. Anything but godlike visages of authority and power, they conveyed a certain shyness rather than omnipotence. Black and gray wraiths, hairless and wide-eyed, they left in their wake a sense of startled surprise at the nature of the ovoid’s passengers.

Fawn felt a wrenching dislocation, as if they had suddenly reversed direction and picked up speed. Sooner than they had left them behind, they were once again surrounded by hundreds of the dazzlingly effulgent tunnels. She fought to recover her internal equilibrium.

“What happened there? It felt like someone pulled the floor out from under us!”

Pulickel swallowed several times, working to clear the rising gorge from his throat. “Maybe somebody did.”

“The gods saw us.” Having long since resigned herself to whatever fate had in store for them, Ascela wasn’t overly concerned. Jorana gestured agreement.

“They didn’t look much like gods to me,” Pulickel countered. “They were small, and kind of skinny. Builders yes, engineers certainly, perhaps miracle-workers even, but gods? I don’t think so.”