Land and Overland - Omnibus (111 page)

Three other Vadavaks, having faced strong and well-armed enemies for the first time, were withdrawing in dismay, fleeing across the plain towards the point where they had materialized. The only other movements among the aliens, Toller noted with an exultant feeling of relief, came from the white-and-crimson carpet of the wounded. It was a tragedy that even one of the Kolcorronians had been lost, but…

"Behind you, Toller!"

Jerene's warning shriek came too late. Toller heard the sudden movement shockingly close behind him, and realized at once that he had become too complacent, too certain that the diminutive Vadavaks had none of the tenacity of a genuine warrior. Now he felt a curious, unmanning sensation in the calf of his left leg. There was no pain to speak of, and yet he had just received the most serious injury of his life. He looked down and saw that a Kolcorronian sword, almost certainly Tradlo's, had gone to the bone in his leg. He struck backwards at the wounded Vadavak who had been lying on the ground, feigning death and awaiting his chance to strike. The alien sighed and rolled away to meet the point of Jerene's sword.

"We must finish the lot of them," Jerene shouted. "Show no mercy!"

"Keep everybody well away from the machine," Toller said to her, wondering why Vantara was not more in evidence in her capacity as Jerene's commander. "It is bound to detonate, or whatever it does, any second now."

Jerene nodded and signalled for the combatants to move farther away from the box, which was now glowing like fresh snow in the light of the rising sun. "And we had better take a look at that leg of yours."

"I'll be…" Toller glanced down at his leg and felt a moment of giddiness as he saw that a grinning red mouth had opened right across the calf. It was spewing blood down his ankle on to the grass, and in its depths he could see the gleam of bone. When he tried to move the leg his foot remained obstinately on the ground.

"That has to be stitched here and now," Jerene said in a hard and unemotional voice. "Somebody give me a held kit."

Toller allowed himself to be lowered to the ground beside Steenameert, who was beginning to show signs of regaining consciousness. He felt nauseated, and was glad to surrender all responsibility to another for a period, even when the pain of the stitching began. With his chin resting on folded hands, Toller clenched his teeth and distracted himself from the pain by thinking about the impeller. What would the crucial moment be like? Would they hear great explosions or be blinded by flashes of lightning? And why was the cursed box taking so long to unleash its power?

"Surely more than four minutes have passed since we arrived in this place," he said to those who had clustered around to watch his leg being repaired. "What say you? Can you see anything happening?"

Steenameert, who was lying with his face towards the sky, startled Toller by answering his question as though he had never been unconscious. "I don't know about our wonderful white box, Toller—but I think something very strange is happening up there."

He pointed straight up to the zenith and others followed his example. Toller twisted his upper body around, grunting as he involuntarily disturbed the work being done on his leg, and looked into the centre of the sky. The vast disk of Land was divided equally by the terminator, and mounted exactly on the central line was the pulsing yellow star the watchers knew to be the Xa. But changes had taken place since Toller had first looked at it.

The Xa had grown much brighter—it now resembled a miniature sun—and its pulsations had become so rapid that they were almost merging into each other. It came to Toller that he had been so preoccupied with Greturk's impeller, and the events surrounding it, that he had practically forgotten about that infinitely greater impeller which had spread itself across the weightless zone. The collective attention focused on the distant Xa seemed to throw a telepathic gateway wide open…

I cannot believe you are doing this to me, Beloved Creator!
The anguish-laden message washed down out of an aureate sky.
After all I have done for you, you are bringing forward the time of my death! I implore you, Beloved Creator, do not deny me a last few minutes in your treasured company…

"What's going on here?" Toller growled, tearing the needle and suture from Jerene's fingers as he raised himself to a sitting position. "Greturk told us that his cursed box of tricks would do its job long before the Xa … long before Dussarra was hurled into another galaxy … but the way things are going…" He fell silent, a chill perspiration gathering on his brow as he realized that he, and everybody he knew, and his entire home world could be on the point of instantaneous destruction.

Steenameert raised himself on one elbow. "It may be that Greturk's device is imperfect. He told us it was built in too much haste. Dussarrans can make mistakes, also, and it may be that the delay mechanism he spoke of is not…" Steenameert's voice faded and his eyes grew wide as he pointed with one trembling finger at something beyond Toller's shoulder.

Toller followed his gaze and swore savagely as he saw something which had the power to dismay him, even in this time of astonishing and momentous events. The gleaming white figure of a Vadavak, one who must have concealed himself during the closing chaotic moments of battle, had appeared by the boxy shape of the impeller. Professional training must have made him much stronger than the average Dussarran because, as the petrified humans watched, he squatted and put his hands under one edge of the impeller, then slowly but steadily straightened up.

The impeller tilted in unison with his movements and fell on its side. An instant later, almost as though triggered by impact, something in the white box began to emit a mechanical scream.

Toller tried to scramble to his feet, but his left leg refused to take his weight and he lurched painfully to the ground. "That's the final warning," he shouted, undergoing a unique kind of torment because of his inability to move. "The machine must be uprighted—
otherwise all is lost!"

He looked to the three women who were standing in his field of view, willing them to undertake what he could not. Mistekka and Arvand continued to stare down at him, frozen to the spot by a new kind of fear. Vantara dropped to her knees, covered her face and began to sob.

"I expect promotion for this," Jerene exclaimed as she leapt to her feet, took her sword in hand and began to run towards the impeller. The strength inherent in her solid limbs, sprinter's strength, drove her through the impeding grass at a speed Toller doubted he could have matched even had he not been wounded.

The lone Vadavak, showing vastly greater courage and obduracy than his vanquished comrades, chose not to retreat. He ran towards Jerene and, when separated from her by several paces, dived at her ankles. She partially thwarted him with a scything blow of her sword—a touch of crimson was abruptly added to the bleached palette of the scene—but the alien succeeded in clamping his hands around one of Jerene's shins, bringing her to the ground. There followed a moment in which it was impossible to see what was happening, a moment in which Toller was struck dumb with anxiety, and then Jerene was up and running again.

The shrieking of the white rectangle seemed to intensify as she reached it. She grasped its nearer top edge and tried to pull it downwards, but it resisted her efforts. She ran around to the farther side and disappeared from view as she stooped to gain a more effective hold on the massive cabinet. And then, with nerve-destroying slowness, the impeller rotated into its normal attitude.

In less than one heartbeat, Jerene had reappeared from behind the impeller and was sprinting—head thrown back and limbs blurring—towards the fear-stricken watchers. She had covered perhaps a third of the distance to safety when the impeller suddenly fell silent. In the absence of its frenetic screaming another message of hysteria was perceived with silent and dreadful clarity, beating down from the remote apex of the heavens.

Do not kill me, Beloved Creator! Do not…

Toller, his face contorted into an inhuman mask of dread, looked beyond Jerene and saw the lustrous cabinet of the impeller begin to change its appearance. It glimmered and threw off expanding pale images of itself, layered versions of reality which flowed outwards to encompass all that could be seen of space and time.

Jerene was running through that shimmering matrix of what was and what might be, and Toller fancied she was calling his name. In one agonizing thrust of his limbs he forced himself into an upright position and tried to move towards her.

But above Jerene the entire dome of the sky had begun to convulse and contort. Concentric rings of eye-searing brilliance were pulsing and flooding outwards from the Xa, and they were clashing in intolerable discords with the emanations from the white box…

Too much is happening at once.
Toller thought in the wildest extremities of terror.

EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING AT ONCE…

A deep, velvety and infinite darkness—a kind of night which was outside of Toller's previous experience—suddenly pervaded the scene. It was as though an opaque cover had been clamped over the entire planet. The blackness above was made even more intense by the fact that the impeller, after its display of dimensional sorcery, was now glowing like a huge block of fluorescent ice, casting a shallow pool of illumination over the silenced battle field.

Toiler was still, blinking, trying to force his eyes to adapt to the strange new conditions, when Jerene reached him and allowed herself to be brought to a halt by his arms. She clung to him for a brief period, trembling and breathing harshly, then straightened up and stepped back a pace. For an instant Toller half-expected her to give him a formal salute, as though making amends for the breach of some rigorous discipline. Vantara, who had been standing close by, moved to Toller's side and gently enfolded his arm with hers.

Toller was scarcely aware of her presence as he gazed into the awesome emptiness of the heavens. At first he had thought the dark celestial canopy was completely featureless, but as his eyes continued to adjust he began to pick out coldly remote points of light which could be identified as stars. They were faint and sparse compared to those he had known all his life, so meagre with their output of light that an appreciable time went by before he seized on the strangest and most disconcerting factor of all.

Overland's sister world had vanished from its place directly above.

In its place, in the crown of the heavens, there was nothing more than a handful of chilly flecks of light arranged in alien configurations.

Steenameert, overcoming his paralysis, rose to his feet behind Toller and spoke with the rapt voice of a child. "It was all to no avail, Toller. We have been cast out. This place is not home to us."

Toller nodded, not trusting himself to reply, still yielding up his mind and soul to the black void which spanned his vision.
We have indeed been cast out,
he told himself.
This is how the universe will look when it has grown old…

"Such darkness," Vantara whispered, pressing herself closer to Toller. "It pleases me not at all—and I'm
cold."

"In that case," Toller said, firmly disentangling his arm from hers, "I suggest that you begin gathering materials to build a fire. It may be a long time until dawn—if dawn ever comes."

"Of course dawn will come!" Vantara, angered by his symbolic rejection, was instantly on the offensive. "How can dawn fail to come? What a foolish thing to say!"

Toller realized with a surge of pity that she had no inkling, no glimmer of understanding of the momentous series of events the group had survived. His own insight, derived from telepathic exchanges with Divivvidiv and Greturk, was nebulous and patchy, but he knew in his bones that Overland—instead of being annihilated—had been projected into an inconceivably remote region of the universe.

And the "universe" he was thinking about was not even the limited and well-defined entity which came to mind when Kolcorronian scientists used the word. It was that woolly, intangible and maddeningly elusive philosophical concept which Divivvidiv had referred to as the
space-time continuum.
Toller had grasped the notion at the time of his telepathic tuition, but in spite of all his efforts his understanding of it had been fading ever since, like the wistful memory of a dream.

Now it was all but gone, the only lingering remnant being its effect on his modes of thinking. Without being able to justify the idea in any form of words, he was quite prepared to believe that the incomprehensible forces unleashed by the Xa in its death throes could have displaced Overland in time as well as in space, perhaps far into the future of some parallel cosmos.

He was finding it hard to remember why he had ever been enamoured of Vantara in the first place—and now, gazing at her beautiful but petulant face, he sensed an unbridgeable gulf opening between them. She had closed her mind, and as a consequence had no way of sharing Toller's principal worry of the moment. Once, during the long hours of the flight to Dussarra, he had asked Divivvidiv how he knew the relocation device would not deposit the planet in the depths of interstellar space, too far from a sun for "minor" adjustments to be made in its position. Divivvidiv, possibly lost for a good answer, had slipped away from the question with some comments about
probability coalescence
and
abstruse self-generating design features of the Xa
which in the final outcome were to cope with
biological viability zones
and
orbital dynamics.

Now Toller had to ask himself if there was a sun hidden behind the passive bulk of the planet. Either there would be a normal sunrise some hours from now, or Overland would grow colder and colder, and all its inhabitants would perish in never-ending blackness. There was only one way to obtain the answer, Toller realized, and that was by waiting. And there was no point in waiting in the dark…

"Why is everyone not gathering wood?" he shouted jovially, turning away from Vantara. "Let us find an agreeable place—away from these miserable alien corpses—and light a good fire to comfort us through the night."