P
rovoking the
fangrace-pair
to attack simultaneously, Alice left them tangled in each other’s many limbs. Passing behind the nearer then, she led Kalifriki to a narrow bridge which took them above a canyon whose bottom was lost in blackness. Achieving its farther side, she took him down a twisting way beneath an evening sky of dark blue wherein lights that were not stars burned unblink¬ing at near distances. Vivid, against the darkness, an incandescent rainbow took form.
“Strange,” she muttered.
“What?” Kalifriki asked.
“There was never a rainbow here before.”
“And it is night, is it not?” Kalifriki asked.
“Yes. It began darkening as we entered that last place.”
“In some traditions on Earth a rainbow is the sign of a new covenant,” Kalifriki said.
“If that is the message, it is more cryptic than communicative,” she said.
Suddenly, the faint sounds of female voices which had been with them constantly since their arrival rose in volume. From sighs to wailings, they had been shaped somehow into a slow, eerie tune which rose and fell as if working toward an ominous crescendo it never quite reached, returning constantly to begin again, yet another variation on plaints of pain, punctuated with staccato bursts of hysterical laughter.
A cool wind came by, gusting among the high rocks amid which they moved. On several occasions, the ground shook beneath their feet.
Reaching the end of their downward way and turning to the left, Alice beheld a deep crater in which a lake of orange lava boiled, flames darting above it, casting its light upon the high, piped walls which surrounded it. Their trail split here, an arm of it going in either direction about the lake’s oval perimeter, cinder-strewn between its jagged shores and the rise of the organpipe walls.
Alice halted.
“What is the matter?” Kalifriki asked.
“A burning lake,” she said. “It wasn’t here before.”
“What was?”
“A maze, full of pits and deadfalls, flooded periodically with rushing torrents.”
“What now?”
“I suppose we must choose a way and go on, to find the place of which I told you that first night over dinner—the place we have glimpsed but never quite reached. There are bones there, and an open wall. I think it is the place of the Singularity. Which way should I go?”
“Let us trust to the falling of the Thread. Find a random way to choose.”
She stooped and picked up a pebble. Turning, she cast it, hard, back in the direction from which they had come. It struck against the rock wall and bounded back. It rolled past them to the right.
“Right,” she said, and they turned and took up their way again, in that direction.
The trail was perhaps six feet in width, light from the blazing cauldron to their left casting their shadows grotesquely upon the fluted wall. The way curved in and out as they went; and they felt the heat—painfully, after a time—upon their left sides. Dark fumes obscured the starlike lights in the sky, though the rainbow still glowed brightly. The chorus of pained voices was partly muted by the popping and crackling from below, by the faint roaring that came in undertone.
As they rounded a bend they heard a moaning.
“Alice… ” came a soft call from the right.
She halted.
Bleeding from countless cuts, one leg missing from below the knee, the other from above it, left arm dangling by a thread of flesh, a woman who resembled her lay upon a low ledge to the right, face twisted in the orange glow, her remaining eye focused upon them.
“Alice—don’t—go—on,” she gasped. “It—is—awful. Kill me—quickly—please…”
“What happened? What did this to you?” Alice asked.
“The tree—tree of glass—by the lake.”
“But that is far. How did you get here?”
“Don’t know,” came the reply. “Why is it—so? What have we done?”
“I don’t know.”
“Kill me.”
“I cannot.”
“Please…”
Kalifriki moved forward. Alice did not see what he did. But she knew, and the broken lady did not call to them again.
They passed on in silence then, the lake growing more turbulent as they moved, now shooting great fountains of fire and molten material high into the air. The heat and fumes grew more oppressive. Periodically, niches glowed again in the wall to their right, wherein bleeding Alices stood, eyes staring, unseeing, straight ahead, lips twisting in their song which rose in intensity now, overcoming the lake’s roaring. Whenever they approached these figures, however, they faded, though the song remained.
Then, in the flaring light, as they neared the far end of the trail, Alice beheld a rough area amid the cinders and congealed slag. She slowed, as she realized that the mangled remains of a human body were smeared before her, still somehow stirring. She halted when she saw the half-crushed head beside the way.
Its lips moved, and a wavery voice said, “Give him what he wants, that I may know peace.”
“What—What is it that he wants?” she asked.
“You know,” it gasped. “You know. Tell him!”
Then the lake bubbled and roared more loudly. A great strand of flame and lava leaped above it and fell toward them. Alice retreated quickly, pushing Kalifriki backward behind her. The fiery mass fell across the trail, obliterating the remains, draining, fuming, back into the lake. When it was gone, the ground smoking before them, the remains of the dead Alice had vanished, also.
They halted, waiting for the way to cool, and Kalifriki asked, “What is this knowledge of which she spoke?”
“I—I’m not certain,” Alice replied.
“I’ve a feeling,” Kalifriki said, “the question will be repeated in more specific and equally colorful terms at some point.”
”I’d guess you’re right,” she told him.
Shortly, they walked on, treading quickly across the ravaged area, beneath the rainbow, the song suddenly reaching a higher pitch of wailing as they went.
As they neared the farther end of the lake, another molten spume reached near at hand. Alice halted, waiting to see in which direction the flashing tower might topple. But it stood, swaying, for a long while, almost as if trying to decide the matter itself. It took on a spiraling twist for a while before abruptly falling toward the wall perhaps twenty paces ahead of them.
They retreated even farther as this occurred. The spume fell in slow motion above the trail, its tip touching the wall, whence it flowed downward to the right hand trail’s edge. Its upper portion remained in place, ten or twelve feet overhead, spirals working through it in two directions, braiding themselves now into a sputtering yellow-orange fretwork of light and molten material. The archway thus formed ceased its swaying and stood pulsing before them.
“We suddenly have a burning gate ahead of us,” Alice stated.
“Is there any other way to proceed?” Kalifriki asked.
“No,” she said.
“Then it would seem we have little choice.”
“True. I just wanted you to know the nature of this encounter.”
“Thank you. I am ready.”
They moved ahead, and the archway maintained its position as they approached. Passing beneath it, the air was filled with crackling sounds and the prospect wavered. Alice’s next step took her onto a rough silvery way with nothing about her but the starlike lights. Another pace, and Kalifriki had passed through also, the gateway vanishing behind him.
It was not a continuous surface upon which they stood, but rather a forty-foot span of about the same width as the trail they had quitted. It ended abruptly in all directions. Looking downward over its edge, she saw, at a distance impossible to estimate, the twisted surface of the land they had been traversing, cracked, pierced, brightly pied, monoliths darting about its surface, the rainbow still arched above it; and even as she watched, it seemed to change shape, lakes flowing into valleys, flames leaping up out of shadows and crests, new jigsaw pieces of color replacing old ones with less than perfect fit. And about them, still, rang the plaints of the dead Alices. She moved ahead, toward the farther end of the silver way.
“We’re high above the land,” she said, “walking on the surface of a narrow asteroid. It is like a broken-out piece of a bridge. I’m heading toward its farther end.”
“Alice,” Kalifriki said as they began to move again, “I have a question.”
“What is it?”
“Did you come to Earth on the first vessel or the second?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“You said that Nelsor and four clones came here and had their trouble. Then later, his Alice, learning of this, made the voyage with the three remaining clones, yourself among them.”
“Did I? I don’t recall exactly how I phrased it.”
“Then, when you told me of your bedroom encounter with Nelsor, it sounded as if you, he, and the original Alice all made a single journey together.”
“Oh. That happened on a different voyage, elsewhere.”
“I see,” Kalifriki said, matching her pace.
Tenuous wisps of fog swept by them as they walked, followed by larger puffs. Something massive drifted downward from overhead, possibly on a collision course, possibly about to miss them. It was of about the same shape and albedo as the thing on which they moved.
”Another asteroid headed this way,” she reported. ”A bit of fog’s come by, too.”
“Let’s keep going to the end.”
“Yes.”
Just as they reached the extremity of their way, the second piece of spanning slid into place before them and remained there, as if joined with their own. This one curved to the left.
“We’ve acquired an extension,” she said. ”I’m going to continue along it.”
“Do so.”
Several additional pieces moved by as they walked—one of them the section they had quitted, removing itself from the rear and drifting forward to join them again ahead.
“It’s extending itself down toward a cloud bank,” she told him, as she peered in the new direction it was taking. Then, too, they seemed to be moving, relative to the overall form of the shifting panorama below.
She crossed to another section. The clouds came on quickly, they were of soft pink, pale blue, light lime, streaked through each other in delicate abstract waves.
Several hundred paces later she heard a scream. Halting, and looking to the right, whence it seemed to have come, she beheld nothing but clouds. She began to gnaw at her lower lip as the cry was repeated.
“What is it?” Kalifriki asked.
“I don’t know.”
Then the clouds parted, and she saw a pair of drifting boulders but a few feet distant. The upper torso, head, and shoulders of a woman resembling herself lay sprawled upon the left-hand stone. Severed from these and occupying the slightly lower right-hand one lay the rest of her, twitching.
“Alice!” the figure cried. “He would know which of us was responsible. None of us could tell him. That leaves only you. Tell him what happened, for mercy’s sake!”
Then the two rocks flew off in opposite directions and the clouds closed in again. Kalifriki could feel Alice shaking.
“If you know whatever it is he wants,” he said, “perhaps you should tell him. It may make life a lot easier.”
“Perhaps I do and perhaps I don’t,” she said. “I suppose I’ll learn when I’m asked a direct question. Oh!”
“What? What is it?”
“Nelsor. I reached him for a moment. Or he reached me. He is gone now.”
“Could you tell anything about his condition?”
“He seemed a mix of emotions. Happy that I was coming—in some other way disturbed. I don’t know.”
They walked again. The singing went on, and periodically they could feel the vibrations as new pieces of their twisted passageway through the sky assembled themselves. The colored fogs parted and came together again, flirting with her vision, providing tantalizing glimpses of some vantage that lay far ahead.
Their way seemed telescoped from break to break in their passage through the fog. Suddenly, Alice halted, stiffening, saying “Stop!” sharply.
“What is it?” Kalifriki asked.
“End of the trail, for the moment,” she replied. “It just stops here. We are at the edge, and I am looking down again, through a thinning fog, at the distant land. The fog at our sides is dissipating now, too. That which is ahead of us is still thick. A redness flows through it.”
They waited, and the red mist passed by degrees, revealing, first, an almost sculpted-seeming rocky prominence, pointed centrally, descending symmetrically at either hand and curving forward into a pair of gray-blue stony shoulders, and before them a flat yellow oval of sandy stone, raised above lesser step like formations, irregular, more blue than gray, descending into mist. To the rear, set within the bulk of the prominence, a shelf-like niche was recessed at shoulder height; and at the oval’s approximate center lay a well, a low wall of red stone blocks about its mouth. Another structured wall—this one of black stone—stood to the far left and downward of the oval, perhaps twenty feet in length, eight in height. Chains hung upon it. And this entire vision seemed to be quivering, as through a heat-haze.
More of the mist blew away, and the lines of the lower slopes came into view. Watching, as the last of it fled, Alice saw that the base of the entire prominence was an abruptly terminated thing, at about twice the height’s distance below the oval, jagged blue icicles hanging beneath, as if a frozen mountaintop had been torn loose and hurled into space to hover against the blackness and the unblinking points of light; and now she could see that the rainbow’s end lay within the oval.
Despite this clearing, the entire monumental affair still seemed to be vibrating.
“What is it?” Kalifriki asked at last.
Slowly, she began describing it to him.
N
elsor, I had only one thing to tell you before, but now I have two. Please acknowledge. There is perturbation within the well of the dot because another singularity is approaching—also a second peculiar item, of energy and negative field pressure trapped within a tube. Please acknowledge. This is a serious matter. I understand now what it was about the monk which first troubled me. Here at the center of things I can feel it clearly. He is very dangerous and should be removed from our universe at once. Release me and I will deal with him immediately. Acknowledge, Nelsor! Acknowledge! There is danger here!