The Blood Red Game

FOUR

Renark and his companions watched the screens as the shoals of craft from Migaa entered the Shifter's area of space.

Then the Thron ships came slashing upwards from their planet - like sharks. There was an insane, inexplicable anger in their ferocity.

From other directions a large, motley force of Entropium warships helped the Migaan craft dispose of the outnumbered Thron vessels. The fight was much shorter than Renark's.

'They're just in time,' commented Olesson, watching the screen. 'The system's due to begin transition again pretty soon. Better wave your universe goodbye, Renark. You won't be seeing it again for some time if at all.' He grinned callously.

Ignoring the big man, Renark turned to his friends.

'We'll have to split up. There must be people here who aren't just criminals - people who've made some attempt to explore or analyse the system. They can help us. Move about the city - ask questions.'

There was a peculiar note in Klein's voice. 'Go to see Mary the Maze, Renark. I can't guarantee she'll help, but she'll serve as a warning to you. She was an anthropologist, I hear. She explored as much of the Shifter as she was able. But go and see where her curiosity got her, Renark.'

'Where is she?'

'I'm not sure - but everyone knows her on Northside. You'll find her soon enough if you ask.'

'Okay, I will.' He said to the others: 'You take other parts of the city. Don't ignore any piece of information, speculation or rumour - it could all be useful. We've got to work fast!' 'But fast,' sneered Olesson as they left.

Walking out of the untidy building, they saw the bright arrows of fire searing down on the landing-field two miles away. They split up.

Renark had chosen the worst possible time to look for anyone.

As he went from hotel to hotel, from bar to bar on the north side of Entropium, the men and women from Migaa began to pour exuberantly in.

They got drunk quickly and the whole city came alive and excited. Not only human beings celebrated the new 'shipment's' arrival. Aliens of many kinds joined in with their own forms of merry-making.

Once, a creature like a giant cross between a slug and a caterpillar addressed him in high-pitched Terran, but he ignored it and moved on, searching, asking questions, getting incoherent or facetious replies.

And then the nightmare really began.

Quite suddenly Renark felt nausea flood through him, felt his vision blur and sent out a mind-probe which took in the whole of the system and part of the galaxy beyond it. His mind just refused to accept some of the information it received - he couldn't take it in.

The galaxy seemed distant, and yet retained the same point in space in relation to the Shifter.

Then the whole planet seemed suddenly engulfed by a weird, greyish mist. The darkness gave way to it.

For an instant, Renark thought he saw the buildings of the city begin to fade again. He felt weightless and had to cling to the side of a house. The house seemed solid enough, but its components moved beneath his hands and his own body seemed diffused, lacking its normal density. As his mind swirled, he returned it to the comforting reality of the galaxy, as he habitually did in tunes of stress. But the galaxy was no longer real.

It seemed ghostly, he was losing touch with it. He very nearly panicked, but controlled himself desperately.

Then he understood what was happening.

They were leaving the galaxy - leaving the universe Renark loved, that he was prepared to die for. He had an unreasoning sense of betrayal - as if the galaxy were leaving him rather than the reverse. He breathed heavily. He felt like a drowning man and sought for something to grab - physically and mentally. But there was nothing. Nothing constant. Nothing that did not change as he sensed or saw it.

The grey city seemed to tilt at an angle and he even felt himself sliding. He staggered on down the crazily angled couch ripped from some ship and evidently used as a bed by the mad woman.

'Mary?' he said to the muttering wreck. 'Mary?'

She stared at him and the look in her eyes repelled him.

'Adam? Ah, no. Come in, Castor, but leave Pollux outside. Or is it Ruben Kave, Hero of Space, come to visit me?' Her mouth broadened, the lips curving upwards. She made a vague, graceful gesture with her hand. 'Do sit down,' she said.

There was nowhere to sit He remained standing, disturbed, nonplussed.

'I'm Renark,' he said. 'I want information. It's important - can you help me?'

'Help…?' The voice was at first detached. Her fingers moved constantly over the keyboard. 'Help…?' Her face twisted. Then she screamed.

'Help!'

He took a step forward.

The hands moved more swiftly, agitatedly over the board.

'Help!' She began to emit a kind of soft scream.

'Mary,' he said urgently. He could not touch the smooth shoulders. He leant over the drooling woman. 'It's all right They say you've explored the Shifter - is that true?'

'True? What's true, what's false?'

'What was it like, Mary? What did this to you?'

A groan, masculine and desperate, came from the woman. She stood up and walked unsteadily towards the couch, lay down on it, gripping the sides.

'What's the Shifter, Mary? What is it?' His face felt tight, as tight as his rigidly controlled emotions.

'Chaos…' she mumbled, 'madness - super-sanity - warmth. Oh, warmth… But I couldn't take it, no human being could - there's no anchor, nothing to recognise, nothing to cling to. It's a whirlpool of possibilities crowding around you, tossing you in-all directions, tearing at you. I'm falling, I'm flying, I'm expanding, I'm contracting, I'm singing, I'm dumb - my body's gone, I can't reach it!'

Her eyes stared. Suddenly she looked at him with some sort of intelligence.

'Renark you said your name was?'

'Yes.' He was steeling himself to do something he didn't want to do.

'I saw you once, perhaps - there. Here. There.' She dropped her head back and lay on the couch mumbling.

He sensed the chaos of the Shifter brawling about in the back of his mind. He thought he knew how it could have turned her mad - felt some sympathy with what she was talking about.

He turned all his attention to her, using his sensing ability to sort her out into her composite atoms, concentrated on her sensory nerves and her brain structure in an effort to get some clue to the effect which the Shifter had had on her.

But there was little physically wrong, although it was obvious that the quantity of adrenalin flooding her system was abnormally high and that this, perhaps, was the reason for her almost constant movement.

But her mind wasn't open to Renark. He was not a tele-path and was almost glad at that moment that he couldn't see into her wrenched-apart mind. Neither was he tele-kinetic, but nonetheless he hated even this form of intrusion as he studied her muscle responses, her nervous system, in an effort to find some clue how to pull her together long enough to get some answers to his questions.

He felt her move.

'Asquiol!' she said. 'Isn't that a name - something to do with you? Aren't you dead?'

How could she possibly know of Asquiol?

'Yes. Asquiol's the name of my friend. But I'm alive…'

He half cursed the introduction of this new element of mystery in an already difficult situation.

'What about Asquiol?'

But there was no response from the mad woman, who had now resumed her vacant staring at the ceiling.

He tried another tack.

'Mary - where did you go? What did you discover?'

'The ragged planet,' she muttered. 'I go there - went there - last - the lattice planet. Stay away.'

Now he wanted to shake the information out of her but he had to coax.

'Why?' he said more gently. 'Why, Mary?'

'Doesn't travel with the Shifter - not all of it, some of it - exist in other dimensions, travelling independently? The Hole is there - the dwellers lurk in the Hole. They know everything - they mean no harm, but they are dangerous. They know the truth, and the truth is too much!'

What truth?'

'I forget - I couldn't hold it. They told it to me. It wasn't fair.' She stared at him again and once more intelligence was in her eyes. 'Don't believe in justice, Renark - don't for an instant take its existence for granted. It doesn't exist. You learn that in the gaps, you can make it - but it breaks down in the real universe. You find that in the gaps.'

'Gaps? What are they?' He wondered at the peculiar accent she put on the word.

'The ragged planet's gaps' She sighed and fidgeted on the couch. 'That's where I finally forgot - where every theory, every scrap of information gathered on the other planets was meaningless. And I forgot - but it did me no good. I was curious… I'm not now, but I want rest, peace, and I can't have it. It goes on. They know, though - they know, and their hate has kept them sane…'

'Who are "they", Mary?'

'The Thron - the horrible Thron. And the Shaarn know, too, but they are weak - they couldn't help me. The beasts. Don't let them push you into the… untime… the un-space. Their weapons are cruel. They do not kill.'

'Thank you, Mary,' Renark said, at a loss to help her. 'I will go to Thron.'

She rose from the couch, screaming: 'I said not, spiral, magenta, irri-bird, night. Not, sight of droan - not: Oh, no…'

She began sobbing and Renark left the room.

He walked down the corridor, brooding, dissatisfied with the little he had learned, but with a definite plan of action now. He must go to Thron and discover the truth of Mary's statement.

Whatever happened, the Thron would be of more help - assuming they could be encouraged to help - than the decadent inhabitants of Entropium, who refused to know anything. Though he could half sympathise with anyone who didn't wonder or question. The boiling chaos of the Shifter as it moved through the dimensions of the multiverse was enough to disturb anyone.

He walked out of the hotel and found, to his relief, that the planet seemed to have quietened down and was presumably in normal space again, but in an alien universe.

Ah he walked swiftly towards the building, he allowed his mind to put out tendrils and was relieved when he sensed, beyond the insane perimeter of the Shifter, the solid, ordered planets and suns of a wide, spiral galaxy like his own in general components, although here and there he came across organic and chemical formations which he did not recognise.

When he got back to the control room in the skyscraper, Klein said: 'Half the new Migaa-load are dead. As usual, they panicked and caused trouble while we were in transit, so we cleaned them up. The rest are settling down or running back to the launching pads… How did you get on with Mary?'

'She said that the Thron knew about the Shifter's nature - or that's what I believe she said.'

Asquiol and Willow, both pale, walked in. He nodded to them.

'Were the Thron the race who initially attacked us?' he asked Klein.

Far away he heard ships blasting off. Klein cursed. 'They were warned. That's another lot on their way to death.'

'What do you mean?'

'Every time there are newcomers who try to use the Shifter as a transport from their own universe to another, we warn them that once they're here they're stuck. But they try. Maybe one or two make it - I don't know. But I think not. Something stops you leaving the Shifter once you're here.'

'It's impossible to get off?' Willow said worriedly.

Renark glanced at Willow. It was funny, he thought, how crisis took different people in different ways. Willow sounded as if she was going to break down. Asquiol evidently hadn't noticed it. He was curious to see how Talfryn would look and act when he came back.

Klein was talking. That's right, honey. It's harder to get out than in. You don't exist entirely in the space-time matrix of the universe which the Shifter is currently in. We kind of overflow into other dimensions. So when you try to leave, you hit the dimensions at a slight angle and - whoof! You break apart. Some of you goes one way, some of you goes another. No, you can't get out.'

'Renark - you have more problems,' Asquiol said, fiddling with his gloves.

'And more coming, from what I've learned,' Renark said tiredly. 'What did you find out?'

'Not much of anything definite. The eleven planets are called a variety of names by a variety of human and non-human people. There are a million theories about the Shifter's nature, mainly based on folklore and superstition. They say the Thron were here first and might be native to the system. This could explain some of their resentment of alien ships entering.'

'Anything else?'

'There's some race called, colloquially, the "jelly-smellies", who are supposed to know the history of the multiverse. There's a planet called Ragged Ruth which is supposed to be the epitome of Hell in this hellish system.'

'That seems to confirm what Mary told me,' he nodded.

Talfryn came in. His body was loose, worn out. He sat down on the couch.

Renark paused for a moment.

'There are questions which we've got to answer. And we can't take our time getting those answers.

'Why does the Shifter follow this orbit? How does it do it? If we can discover the principle, there may be a chance of adapting it to build ships to evacuate our galaxy. The logic - if that's the word - is abhorrent to us, but it must be mastered. Are all the universes contracting at the same time, I wonder?'

He asked this last question almost hesitantly, bringing it into the open for the first time.

'If so, there is virtually no chance of evacuation. On the other hand, what we discover may enable us to…'

Klein laughed: 'To stop a universe in its natural course of decay or reorganisation? No, Renark!'

'Yes, Klein - if that has to be done!'

'What the hell are we all talking about?' Talfryn said tiredly from the couch. 'We're only three men - against the natural universe. Not to mention the unnatural universe - this terrible place.'

He shook his head. 'Frankly, the little information I've picked up makes me feel helpless, useless, ineffectual in the face of what's happening. I feel ready to give up, not to fight against something that is, judging by all the facts, an immense and inescapable movement of the forces of nature which must logically result in the end of the human race - of all organic life both in our universe, and in others. The human race has had its day - we might as well face it. If you can answer that, Renark, I'd be grateful…'

Suddenly, Renark didn't want Talfryn with him any more.

'I doubt if I could give you an answer which would satisfy you,' he said sadly. 'You're fatalistic. And a fatalist, if you'll forgive me, is also a misanthropist.

'The quality which humanity has, unlike any other form of life in our universe, is its power to control nature. It is the mark of homo sapiens that he has, for millennia, refused to let his environment control him to any real extent. He has adapted to it, adapted it, conquered it. This imminent disaster facing the race is on a larger scale - but the rule still applies. In this case we may be forced to leave our environment and start to work adapting to, and controlling, a new one. If Man can do that, he will have proved forever his right and his reason for existence!'

Talfryn, taken aback by the force of Renark's reply, couldn't answer. He shook his head again and remained broodingly silent. Renark had sensed the man's weakness like a mechanic senses that a piece of equipment, driven beyond its inherent endurance, is due to fail.

So he said: 'Then you'd better stay here.'

Talfryn nodded. 'I've failed you, Renark. But, honestly, it's too big - far too big. Some of us can be optimistic for just so long. But facts must be faced.'

'Facts can be altered,' Renark said, turning away.

'You're giving up?' Asquiol blinked. 'Why?'

'I'm a creature of circumstance,' said Talfryn with a bitter half-smile. He got up and left the room.

Asquiol turned to Renark.

'Why has he done that? Is there something I don't know about?'

'Let's hope so,' Renark said quietly.

He watched his friend who, disturbed and disorientated, turned to look for a long moment at Willow.

Her eyes began to fill with tears.

'I couldn't face it,' she said. 'Not any more - not after what we just went through…'

'You've stopped loving me, is that it?'

'Oh, no, Asquiol - I'll always love you. You… you could stay here with me.'

Asquiol looked sharply at Renark.

'We go to Thron,' he said.

'If you wish to come.'

'Look after yourself, Willow,' said Asquiol. 'I may return - who knows?' And he walked away from her.

He and Renark left the room, left the building and the city and made for the pads, for their black ship, bound for horror and perhaps death.

'He was a fool,' said Willow calmly to Klein. 'There are many who refuse their responsibilities. Fooling themselves they search for a 'higher ideal.' He was a fool.'

'What are responsibilities?' said Klein laconically. 'He knows. Responsibility, my dear, is another word for self-survival.'

She looked at Klein uncomprehendingly.

'I wish he had stayed,' she said.