STAR HOUNDS -- OMNIBUS (38 page)

She knew she was defeated.

But only for now.

She looked away from Zarpfrin and said, “You had better take me to my blip-ship, then. They’ll be wondering what happened to me.”

C
al Shemzak woke with the nightmares stark in his memory.

He was drenched in sweat. The sheets of his bed were twisted and snarled about him.

“Oh, God,” he said as he sat up and leaned his head into his hands. “Oh, my dear God.”

In his hands he felt the tears that were running down his face, tears he had shed in his sleep. He shook his head fiercely, trying to shake off the images, feelings, and sensations.

He had dreamed he had seen his sister Laura … spoken to her. He’d dreamed he had been aboard the strangest spacecraft … dreamed that he had walked down corridors to the heart of an intelligent starship, looked upon wonders beyond words ….

And had then been horribly destroyed.

But how could this be?

Cal Shemzak went to the basin, tapped some water, and briskly washed his face in the cold to rid himself of the clinging horrors.

And the worst of it was, again he had seen it all through more than one set of eyes. Again, he seemed to hear the buzz of some mass mind, as though he were mired into a multiplicity of thought—controlled from outside by something else.

Was it just a nightmare, he thought, looking at his haggard face in the mirror, or something more, something that confirmed his suspicions?

His mind ranged back over the memories now fleeing with wakefulness, and he knew they had been more than nightmares.

A polite knock sounded at the door.

“Pardon me sir,” came Wilkins’ voice. “I let you sleep late because you seemed to have an uneasy time of it last night. But you really should rouse now, sir. Today is, after all, the day of your audience which you’ve so looked forward to.”

“I’m up, Wilkins. How much time do I have?”

“An hour, sir.”

“And you’ll take me to that room 27 or whatever?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“I’ll be ready.”

More ready than they know, thought Cal Shemzak as he went to get a much-needed shower.

A
t the end of the corridor was a door where before there had only been blank wall.

“If you’ll follow me, sir,” said Wilkins, his usual manservant’s attire brightened by a single pink carnation. Cal had selected his usual gray jumpsuit—his wardrobe held not much variety.

Wilkins turned a doorknob and entered a section of this complex previously inaccessible though quite similar to the rest. They walked past a number of doors, each as featureless as the last, toward an open doorway at the end of the hallway. Halfway there, Cal thought he heard voices whispering from one of the side rooms.

Whispers … a kind of chant ….

And Cal Shemzak could feel a sympathetic chord striking in his mind—an attunement to the chanters.

Before he even knew what he was doing, Cal jumped over to the side door, twisted the knob, and slammed his body against metal.

He had one brief glimpse of Wilkins’ horrified expression before the door frame passed his vision and he tumbled pell-mell into a large chamber, tripping and falling onto the floor.

He saw a field of legs before him, legs attached to bodies seated in rows before desks. Forty some bodies, all apparently male, all dressed in the uniform jumpsuit that Cal wore even now, facing a wall.

“What—” Cal said.

“Sir,” said Wilkins. “You mustn’t be in this room!”

Cal swiftly recovered from his surprise and regained his feet. The walls and ceilings were riddled with protuberances and cylinders and other projections of alien machinery. From the ceiling hung lengths of wire—wire specked with sparkling crystalline, attached to the bald pates of the quietly sitting men.

Cal ran around the group to see their faces.

Could his suspicions have been right? Did this explain his dizzy periods, his feelings of contact with others, his nightmares?

He looked and the glazed expressions of the group registered no awareness of him.

Cal Shemzak confronted forty-plus copies of himself. He stood for a moment, stunned.

“Sir,” said Wilkins, advancing towards him. “Your appointment!”

“What’s going on here?” Cal said, retreating, a cold fear parting him slowly away from reason and toward panic. “What total craziness—”

“You can ask the Masters, sir,” said Wilkins in a calming voice. “Now please come—they await you.”

“No,” said Cal, unable to control himself, succumbing to the need to run. “Stay away from me.” He turned to the copies of himself. “Help. You must help me!” he cried.

They opened their eyes, but did nothing.

“Really, sir—”

Cal turned and saw another door, ajar, on the other side of the room. He ran for it.

Get out of here! Get out of here!
The thought pounded in his head maddeningly.

He just needed to run … somewhere.

He flung open the door and was about to rush through it when he realized that a creature blocked his way.

The thing was about five feet tall, humanoid and round, with incredibly large eyes, a huge mouth, and a nose like a baby elephant’s. It wore a shimmering lamé-type robe over its bulbous body, and its forelimbs looked like gigantic stalks of celery.

A speaker box hung attached to its robe. Through this small mechanism issued words: “Aha, Mr. Shemzak. We thought you might take this shortcut. A little surprise for you, no?”

Strange lights glowed in its eyes.

Cal stepped back, more surprised than frightened. The creature before him looked more like something out of a cartoon than from the nightmares of millions of frightened colonists.

“You’re—you’re one of the Jaxdron?” he said, voice filled with disbelief.

“Absolutely and with nary a doubt, Mr. Shemzak.” Its proboscis waved languidly and casually, like a gesture of dismissal. “But all that is behind us now! We have no need for puzzles and mysteries any longer. That is why we have called for an audience with you.”

“I demand you release me,” Cal blustered, his usual cool gone. “I demand you return me to my people!”

“Demands can be made later, good sir,” said the Jaxdron, waving a purplish stalk to someone behind Cal. “In the meantime, you are expected at the meeting and we have so been looking forward to speaking with you face to face, so to speak.”

Both of Cal’s arms were grabbed from behind. He looked around and saw that two of his identical copies, divested now of wires, were holding him.

“Now come along, Cal Shemzak,” said the Jaxdron. “The true games, games that will be heralded in the annals of this galaxy, are just now beginning!”

H
e hung crucified on the galaxy.

His arms were bound to the spiral arms by rings of buzzing force. His legs dangled, wrapped in starglow.

The stars burned his back. The echoes of other galaxies distantly hissed. Martyr, they whispered. A martyr for physics!

“I die,” said Calspar Shemzak, “for my race. I die for humanity!”

“Come now, Mr. Shemzak,” came the Jaxdron voice. “We know you have a tendency for the melodramatic, but don’t you think that this is a bit ridiculous?”

Cal Shemzak opened his eyes.

The stars dissolved into dark spots in his vision. These faded as well, into the cool light of the conference room.

He sat in a chair.

He was still clad in his khaki-colored jumpsuit, though now he also wore a helmet. To this helmet was attached cables that snaked up to myriad color-coded connections on the wall behind him. Force-bands bound arms and legs to the chair.

“The more you cooperate, the easier it will be,” continued the Jaxdron voice. “You have been a playful and clever gamesman thus far. Please do not think that we do not appreciate your efforts, your spirit. However, now we need your cooperation, Calspar Shemzak. We need your most marvelous mind to work with the other minds that we have created.”

Cal Shemzak’s eyes focused upon the Jaxdron relaxing in the gravity baths across from him. What ugly bastards they were! Cal thought, though he usually didn’t make physical judgments about aliens, preferring a more scientific view. He supposed his evaluation was based more on his hatred of these particular aliens—earned hatred—than anything else.

Less than two meters tall, they were humanoid in form, with very large jade eyes, large lippy mouths, and noses that would not look too out of place on tiny Terran elephants. Translator speaker boxes hung nearby: attachments for the interrogation. Wreaths of gas and mist bathed their light-red skin, channeled by gravity modulators below. Occasionally one of the beings would dip its mouth into dense packs of brown and cerulean mists, suck deeply, then casually exhale the stuff—gray now—through uplifted proboscis. Air intake ducts caught these cloud streams and drew them away. The creatures looked like nothing more than a bunch of human genetic freaks at a
ricti
smoking bash.

“I don’t have much control over my unconscious visualizations,” Cal answered in his own good time. “You should know that by now. You’ve been picking my brain long enough!”

“Yes, with great enjoyment.” The central creature was the principal spokesman. This was the first Jaxdron that Cal had actually encountered, several hours before, in the room full of his clones. “You have quite an active imagination, human. The interweavings of symbols and play added a great deal of spice to our analysis and provided additional depth to several strata of gaming.”

“I hope you realize that this is no game for me!” Cal shot back angrily.

“Only because you are not sufficiently enlightened, human.” The sentence was oddly stressed in places—a clear tipoff to its translated nature. Otherwise, the voice was disconcertingly like Cal’s own in timbre and tone. “Perhaps at the end of this session you will be better educated, and appreciate the joys open to you in your role with us.”

“Role? Wonderful. You mean you’re going to tell me why you grabbed me from Mulliphen, destroyed our project, spirited me to one planet, gave me a butler—of all goddamned things—and then shuttled me to another planet? Why you’ve been putting me through paces like a rat in a lab? Why you’ve created dozens of creatures that look just like me? If knowing my role has anything to do with the answers to those questions, I welcome that knowledge a lot!”

The flesh of the creatures turned a deeper red and quivered. A sign of some sort of emotion? The response from the speaker seemed to indicate that. “Oh, yes, you are playing! We do so much enjoy learning the various means of language play employed by different races. The more advanced, the more complex!”

“What do you mean? I’m the sort who plays along—I mean, who goes with the flow. You know that by now, surely. But as to playing with you—”

“Come, come, now, Cal Shemzak,” the Jaxdron admonished. “You know why we nave taken the trouble to capture you of all other Terrans. You are a physicist of quite amazing mental powers. We wish to unlock that dimension you call Omega Space and so extend the sphere of our jovial cavortings farther, so that we may have better games with the Infinity of Existence.”

“Omega Space, huh? But listen, guys, that’s what the project on Mulliphen, by the Interspacial Fault, was all about! And we weren’t very close to cracking the problem at all. I was about the only one who really had a chance.”

“Precisely. Which is why we wanted you. So simple. Despite the subtleties and complexities of Play, in essence, everything is very simple. Wisdom for you, Terran. Do accept our gift. And please do join in with our Joyous Celebrations!”

“You mean, cooperate. Direct my thoughts in the ways you wish.”

“Exactly. You claim to be a reed that bends, and yet now all your many symbols are conflicting with our wishes.”

“No game this time, huh?”

“Games must have rules, Calspar Shemzak!”

“So tell me what this has to do with all my copies out there!” Cal tried to twist his head toward the other room, but could not: the helmet would not permit the movement.

In buzzing, clicking voices, the Jaxdron seemed to confer amongst each other for a time. Then the central alien spoke: “Yes, there is no more reason for hiding matters, Terran. You have provided much amusement in our study of you, but now is the time for clear speaking. As stated before, we Jaxdron wish to find the secrets of Omega Space. We wish to penetrate that dimension. You have the key to unlock our desire. But not by yourself. I presume, Cal Shemzak, you are aware of the basic workings of the organ in your body known as the brain.”

Cal found that he was able to shrug. “Sure. Synapses and neurons, matrices … stuff like that.”

“Yes, well … good enough. In simple language, not only is your particular human mind wired in such a way as to be very skilled in the talents of a top physicist, but the psychic energies produced by your problem-solving in that area harmonize and link to cosmic energies. This is called many things by your race. Intuition. ESP. This is your special gift; and you have trained yourself well in its use. It is unique. Certainly none of our race owns such a talent, which is why we bother with you.

“However, quite simply, it is not good enough.”

“Huh?” Cal blinked, then grinned broadly. “Well, then you can let me go, can’t you? Could you just ship me back to Earth? That would be very nice!”

“Ah, your playful spirit again, Cal Shemzak.” Again, the rippling of its mottled flesh: mirth. “It is refreshing to see it returning in such full force. Now please let us continue.”

“Just trying.”

“Understandable. We had hoped that by merely putting your brain through prescribed paces, our process would work in you subconsciously. But apparently this is not true, as your rebellious nature, as illustrated in this past session, proves. Perhaps if we detailed to your rational thinking process our desires, and engaged your willing cooperation, your subconscious will also cooperate.”

“Well, maybe, yeah. So get on with it. I’m all tied up with suspense!”

In their gravity baths the aliens looked like contorted planets, swathed in clouds, orbiting some unseen sun.

“We determined your essential singular inadequacy while studying you after your capture,” the Jaxdron continued. “And thus we devised the possibility now unfolding.

“By process of both accelerated cloning and cyborg mechanization, we began creating duplicates of you, concentrating in particular upon copying the neural network of your brain. Thus, we hoped by linking these copies physically—and you saw the bulk of them in that other room—we can create a macrocosmic version of your talent.”

The “others” that he had sensed in his dreams—the mirror images, Cal thought. This was the reason!

“When linked together they are an excellent simulacrum of higher intelligence, but we found that no matter how many we created, they lacked the essential vital force—the spirit, if you will—that bridges the gap between logic and genius.”

“Inspiration, you mean,” Cal said.

“Inspiration?” The Jaxdron seemed puzzled. “Ah! Translation: the breath of God. The concept is appropriate, though your notion of God is different than ours.”

“Heathen,” Cal quipped.

“Though not ‘heretical,’ Cal Shemzak. Very good. But we continue: try as we might through all our diagnostic games and our analysis of your mental patterns through our most delightful imposition of brain-play upon your mind—the alternate realities we placed you in—we could not duplicate the odd interplay of thought processes from which your genius springs. Now we should like, quite simply, to plug you into the grid, create a mass-mind with you in the center, thus stepping up your talent and hopefully enabling your magnified mind to come up with a solution to the problem we have presented it.”

“Namely, how to penetrate Omega Space.”

“Precisely, Calspar Shemzak. Precisely.”

“And then what happens to me?”

“What happens?”

“Yes, once my ‘magnified mind’ solves your problem for you.”

“Why, the universe still poses a multitude of problems of interest to us. Perhaps you may be of help in those.”

“No go. The deal is this: I get you into Omega Space, you get me back home.”

“Deal, Calspar Shemzak?”

“Let’s put it this way. Rules. To a game. And that’s the game. I help you win, and the rule is: you take me home.”

The rippling of amusement again. “Oh, no, Calspar Shemzak. The rule is: you cooperate or you experience pain and affliction unlike anything you’ve ever imagined.”

“Gee,” said Cal. “And you were starting to act like such nice guys.”