“The Ashrai ... ,” said Diana. “The ghosts of Unseeli.”
“You are perhaps the only one who might find some way to fight back against the Mater Mundi, and destroy its power. And then, finally, I’ll be free to leave this velvet-lined trap I’ve made for myself.”
No, said a sudden cold voice in both their minds. Cold as the Snow Queen, cruel as the Wicked Stepmother.
I don’t think so, little mindworm.
“It’s her!” shrieked Varnay, his great dark eyes almost bulging from his corpse-pale face. “You brought her here!”
One mind might hide in passion’s chaos, but not two,
said the monster, the boogeyman, the parent that does not love its young.
You betrayed yourselves when you sought to betray me.
Varnay’s panicked shriek became a howl of shock and agony as he burst into flames. His dark rags were swept away in a second, consumed by appalling heat that sent Diana stumbling backward, arms raised to protect her face. Varnay’s corpse-pale flesh caught alight, his fat burning like a living candle. His eyes boiled and burst, running down his burning cheeks till they evaporated in the heat. He screamed, and a jet of flame shot out of his distended mouth. Diana backed farther away from the blazing butter-yellow flames, coughing and choking on the awful smell. Varnay staggered blindly after her, fire-wrapped arms reaching out to her for help she couldn’t give. Horribly, he was still alive and aware as the flames devoured him inch by inch. His mind was screaming louder than his voice, and Diana had to use all her shields to keep him out.
He was between Diana and the only exit, and there was nothing she could do to save him, so she did the only merciful thing she could, for both their sakes. Her powerful mind leapt out in a single vicious thrust, and snuffed out the single bright spark that was his mind. The empty body fell, still burning, to the floor. Diana ran to the door and pulled it open. Behind her she could hear the Mater Mundi screaming in frustrated rage. Diana’s right sleeve burst into flames.
She ran through the House of Joy, and the Mater Mundi pursued her, howling with the voice of a million sleepwalking espers. Diana flung out her own mind like a net, gathering up the raging thoughts and emotions and passions around her, and threw them at the Mater Mundi. All the dark murky waters of desire, of naked lust, of flesh on flesh, of fantasies fulfilled and denied, rose up into a thick boiling cloud, and the Mater Mundi couldn’t see through it to find Diana. She snuffed out her burning sleeve, and ran on through the empty corridors of the House of Joy, and out into the street. She kept running. There was still hope. There was still New Hope.
Once, the floating city of New Hope had been a symbol of reconciliation between man and esper and clone. The three strains of Humanity had lived together in peace and harmony, a living symbol, hoping to build together something far greater than the sum of its parts. But the Empress grew afraid, or jealous, or simply angry at the flouting of her authority, and sent Lord High Dram the Widowmaker and his death squads to destroy New Hope. The attack sleds came howling in out of the sun, unannounced and unexpected, hundreds of disrupter cannon firing in unison. The city’s defenses were quickly swept aside, and the attack sleds landed in waves, discharging Dram’s elite guards. They overran the outnumbered defenders and swept through the streets of New Hope, killing everything in their path. And when the attack was over, the shattered city hung smoking in the air like a giant blackened cinder, and nothing and no one lived there anymore, least of all hope.
After the rebellion, the Esper Liberation Front rebuilt the city and made it their own. Officially, the Elves had given up terrorism now that the war was over, and the old order was thrown down, but they remained as suspicious and determined as ever. No one would ever take their freedom away again. To that end, they lived a quiet life on their floating city, behind extensive fortifications and more weapon systems than you’d find on an average starcruiser. They declared themselves a state within a state, separate and sovereign, and defied anyone to do anything about it. New Hope was a haven for the distressed and the needy, be they esper, clone, or human. They didn’t take just anyone, and you didn’t try to force your way in if you ever wanted to be seen again. Parliament had settled for ignoring them. It seemed safest.
Diana Vertue ran for the city of New Hope with an invisible horde at her heels, and decided she’d worry about how to get in when she got there. If she ever got there. The moment she left the House of Joy, a psistorm of incredible power arose, and pursued her down the street. Every esper was her enemy now, though none knew why. Just the sight of Diana filled their hearts with rage, and they lashed out at her with all their many powers, their individual consciousnesses pushed aside for the moment by the greater massmind of the Mater Mundi. Telepathic assaults slammed against Diana Vertue’s shields, and polters rained down hails of junk and refuse and anything else they could lift. A set of cast-iron railings came crashing down behind her like so many iron thunderbolts. Fires sprang up spontaneously all around her. Men and women threw themselves at her, but her shields kept them at bay. The air was full of screams. Innocent bystanders fell back to give Diana plenty of room as she ran on.
She was running nowhere in particular now, just trying to shake off her pursuers. But there were so many of them, and she was more alone than she’d ever been. Except she wasn‘t, and hadn’t been, for some time now. There had always been something different about Diana Vertue, even before she became Jenny Psycho. Years before, on the ghostworld called Unseeli, Diana had joined her mind with the last remnants of a dead alien race; the Ashrai. She had become a part of their endless song, for a time, and it changed her forever. She’d tried very hard to forget that, fearing for her humanity, but recent events had forced her to remember. And now, in the final extremities of her life, with death or worse so close she could taste it, the song of the Ashrai burst from her lips again. People ran screaming from the sound of it. And the Ashrai came.
They surged around her small running form, vast and awful, brilliant as suns. People could not look at them directly. There were only glimpses of huge teeth and jagged claws and sharp-planed gargoyle faces. The Ashrai were long dead, but they’d never even considered lying down. Their raging storm filled the street and crackled overhead, slamming head-on into the Mater Mundi’s psistorm. Alien and human thoughts crashed together and neither would give way. Chance and probabilities ran mad as the two powerful mind-sets clashed and struggled, and that madness followed Diana through the streets.
There were rains of fish and frogs, and lightning stabbed down repeatedly from a cloudless sky. Springs burst up out of the ground, and buildings caught on fire. Locks unlocked and doors led out instead of in. Streets suddenly led somewhere other than where they used to, and not every place they led to could be returned from. Whole city blocks swapped their positions, and houses were suddenly separated by stores that had never been there before, selling goods with no names. Things giggled in alleyways, and strange faces beckoned from vilely-lit windows. Everywhere dice rolled sixes, and every cardplayer held the dead man’s hand. People spoke in tongues and stigmata ran with alien blood. The old became young, and babies with knowing eyes spoke unpleasant wisdom. And through it all Diana ran on, untouched and unaffected, heading for New Hope and sanctuary.
She commandeered a gravity sled and flew it out past the city limits, the ghosts of the dead Ashrai boiling around her like stormclouds. Their song was thunder and their grotesque faces flashed like lightning. The Mater Mundi was left behind with the city, not defeated or discouraged, but unwilling to draw attention to itself now that immediate victory was no longer possible. Thousands of espers came to themselves again, and found themselves far from where they had been, and didn’t know why. Chance and probability became normal again, and bewildered street cleaners wondered what to do about the tons of fish and frogs clogging the streets.
High above and far away, Diana raced her sled toward New Hope, and stopped singing. Only then did she realize her throat was raw, and her lips were bleeding. Humans weren’t meant to sing with such an alien voice. The Ashrai soared and dipped around her, large as clouds, alien voices raised in an alien song that frightened and disturbed her now she was no longer a part of it. And then they were gone, and there was only the small battered form of Diana Vertue, flying alone in an empty sky.
It took her the best part of two hours to reach the floating city of New Hope, even pushing the sled’s motor to its limits. Evening was falling toward night, and New Hope blazed against the growing darkness like a crown built of precious stones and starstuff. The bright shining lights and colors didn’t fool Diana for a moment. She knew that behind the fairy-tale glamour lay weapons and defenses powerful enough to hold off a good-sized army. The elves would never be slaves again. The Esper Liberation Front might not be the terrorist organization it had once been, but it had lost none of its ferocity or singleness of purpose.
A telepathic probe from the city bid Diana welcome and gave her a location to land her sled. Any other uninvited visitor would have received either a demand for an immediate explanation or a mental compulsion to leave or die, but the elves had always had a soft spot for Jenny Psycho, the only freedom fighter even more hard-core than them. The city grew and grew as Diana approached, stretching miles in diameter, filling the darkening sky with its shimmering towers of crystal and glass. Gossamer walkways linked delicate minarets, and flying elves waved merrily to Diana as they flowed past her in multicolored displays. And from all around came a joined chorus of mental voices crying welcome, welcome, like a great communal embrace, like finally coming home. An almost overwhelming, seductive sense of belonging.
She landed her gravity sled on the edge of a crowded landing pad near the center of the floating city, and bent tiredly over the controls. It had been a long, hard day, and the odds were it wasn’t going to get any easier anytime soon. Her new, hard-won knowledge weighed heavily on her, a burden even more oppressive because she knew she couldn’t share it with anyone; not even the Elves. Let the true nature of the Mater Mundi become widely known, and all espers would become targets, feared and hated, hunted down and destroyed because of the monster they unknowingly held within them. It had to remain secret until Diana could figure out what to do about it. Assuming she lived that long.
She wearily raised her head to find a small group of Elves waiting to welcome her. They all wore the traditional leather-and-chains outfit, with bright ribbons in their hair and colors on their faces. Their muscles were sharply defined, and they all wore swords and guns on their hips. Diana wasn’t impressed. She’d been expecting that. What did impress the hell out of her was the huge statue of herself carved from pale marble, standing tall and proud at the boundary of the landing pad. Diana looked up at her own giant face until she got a crick in her neck, and then turned an ominous stare on the Elven welcoming committee. One of them stepped forward, grinning widely, a tall, strapping brunette with a bandolier of throwing stars crossing her impressive bosom.
“Thought you’d like it,” she said easily. “That’s why we had you land here. Welcome to New Hope, Jenny Psycho. I’m Crow Jane. Highest number of recorded kills in the great rebellion. I speak for the elf gestalt. What I hear, everyone hears.”
“How convenient,” said Diana, stepping down off her sled to join Crow Jane. “So it’s true then; the elves have achieved a conscious massmind?”
“We are a small, faltering thing as yet, but we grow stronger with every day that passes. We have lost nothing in the union and gained much. We took our inspiration from you, Jenny Psycho, and the Maze people. Together we are strong, and we have sworn never to be weak again.”
“I prefer to be called Diana Vertue these days.”
Crow Jane looked at her dispassionately. “Names are important. They define us. You can’t turn time back, undo what you have made of yourself, simply by retreating to an earlier name.”
“Jenny Psycho was only ever a part of Diana Vertue. I found Jenny too limiting, once the war was over.”
“The war is never over.”
“Why the statue of me?” said Diana, tactfully changing the subject.
“Jenny Psycho has many admirers here,” said Crow Jane, smiling again. “They call themselves the Psycho Sluts. Warriors, troublemakers, free thinkers. We’re very proud of them. The cutting edge of elf philosophy. Your name has become a battle cry. They would die for you.”
“I’d much rather they lived for me,” said Diana dryly. “I might need their support. I’ve come here looking for sanctuary. The Mater Mundi wants my head on a stick. Where would the elves stand, if they had to make a choice?”
“We bend our knees to no one,” said Crow Jane. “Not even the so-called Mother Of All Souls. The elves follow their own destiny. We are aware of the psychic upheaval that disrupted the Parade of the Endless recently. Apparently they’re still trying to get frogs out of the guttering. But we are all battle espers here, in memory of the fallen Stevie Blues, and we defend our own. Stay here as long as you wish.”
She led Diana off the landing pad, and everyone relaxed a little now the formalities were over. The other Elves introduced themselves, and Diana pushed aside her bone-deep tiredness to be as gracious and charming as she could manage. The city of New Hope spread out before her, bright and colorful as a city of Christmas trees. And near and far and all around, Diana could hear in her mind the joined chorus of the Elven minds, like a great sustained chord, a harmony of souls.
“So,” said Diana to Crow Jane, making herself focus on the moment. “What else goes on here, apart from training as warriors and yelling my name when you hit things?”